


Always to the Left

by iknowhowmystoryends (gorgeouschaos), notyouranswer (gorgeouschaos)



Series: In a Million Ways, You Chose This [1]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Archivist Sasha James, Dark, M/M, Not sure if this warrants M but safe than sorry and all, Or rather the Spiral's, Some crack snuck in, Spiral!Jon, That's not really relevant but it's important to me you know that, The Mechanisms Were The Archivist's College Band, There's certainly a lot of swearing, at least for quite a while
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-15
Updated: 2021-01-27
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:07:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 18
Words: 20,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23161447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gorgeouschaos/pseuds/iknowhowmystoryends, https://archiveofourown.org/users/gorgeouschaos/pseuds/notyouranswer
Summary: Michael Shelley never finds the Magnus Institute. Gertrude Robinson hires Jonathan Sims as her archival assistant.After that, things get a little... sideways.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims, Sasha James & Tim Stoker
Series: In a Million Ways, You Chose This [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1864744
Comments: 330
Kudos: 1010





	1. Chapter One: Gertrude

**Author's Note:**

> I know this is a bit short, but I wanted to post these first two parts now. My break plans and a week of school got cancelled so I should be able to get the next few chapters out soon-ish.  
> So many thank yous to yumantimatter, who has been absolutely indispensable in helping me conceptualize this fic!  
> Warnings for implications of some suicidal thoughts and what I think is more or less canon-typical violence/body horror. Let me know if you would like any more information.  
> I had to fiddle with the timeline a bit. Hopefully I didn't screw anything major up.  
> Thanks for reading, hope you like it, and I love feedback :)

The moment Jonathan Sims walks into her office, Gertrude knows her decision has been made. 

“Are you here to interview for the position of archival assistant?” she asks. It’s a rhetorical question, of course, but he doesn’t know that. He nods.

“I’m Jonathan Sims,” he says. His handshake is surprisingly strong and he doesn’t flinch away from meeting her eyes.

“Pleasure to meet you,” Gertrude responds, and, for once, she means it. 

Jonathan has the fingerprints of the Web all over him, but there’s something behind his eyes which makes Gertrude wonder if perhaps Elias might be interested in this scrawny university student as well. 

She hires Jonathan the moment the interview finishes. He gives her a small smile and asks when he can start.

Elias knocks on her door two minutes after Jonathan leaves.

“You sure about that one?” he asks. She appreciates that he’s dropped his act of humanity. 

“Are you questioning my judgment?”

He arches an immaculate eyebrow. “You just hired a man marked by the Spider.”

“I know what I’m doing.”

Elias inclines his head and, thankfully, leaves her alone.

Gertrude reminds herself to have Jonathan research additional methods of deterring the Eye. She has enough to deal with without Elias’ constant surveillance.

Within days, Gertrude finds herself impressed with her new assistant. Jonathan-- Jon, as he prefers to be called-- is quiet, intelligent, and naturally inclined towards obsession. He dives into the research she assigns him with single-minded determination and spends the rest of his time bringing a semblance of order to the archives. He doesn’t bother her with inane questions or pester her with offers of tea. 

Gertrude finds herself becoming rather fond of Jon. 

A few months after Jon begins working for the Magnus Institute, Gertrude finds him staring into a cup of tea while ignoring the book beside him. She restrains her instinctive sharp comment and sits beside him. He jolts in surprise. 

“Is something wrong, Jon?” She allows just a hint of compulsion to enter her question. Much as she appreciates Jon’s work, she knows she will need a certain amount of personal insight to carry out her plans.

She used to feel guilty about thinking this way. After the first few years, she learned to bury the feeling. 

“Georgie and I broke up,” Jon says, eyes on his tea. “I knew it was coming, but I hoped…” He trails off. 

“I’m sorry.”

Jon nods jerkily. 

Gertrude places a hand on his shoulder before returning to her work. 

Jon spends more time at the Archives after that. Gertrude surmises his girlfriend was his main tie to the outside world and that, without her, Jon has little else to care about. Another good trait in an assistant.

She attends Jon’s graduation ceremony and smiles at the elation he tries to hide when he sees her. 

“I didn’t expect anyone to come,” he says. If Gertrude cared about anything beyond her mission, she would no doubt feel a pang of sadness for Jon.

“How could I miss it?”

His hug is clumsy, and his shoulder blades are bony beneath his graduation robes. 

Three months later, when Gertrude tells Jon of Mary-- not the whole truth, of course, but a bit of it-- he tells her of Mr. Spider. 

And Gertrude knows that Jon is irrevocably the Archive’s. 

That lovely streak of obsession in Jon comes out in full force, now that his loyalty is only to the Archives. He spends most of his time there, reading and researching statements.

He is by far the best assistant she’s ever had.

Two years later, Gertrude gets word that the Spiral is planning The Great Twisting. She almost hesitates before calling Peter Lukas.

Jon is the best assistant she’s ever had. But her mission comes first. And besides, it’s his mission as well now.

Gertrude knows that Jon will not question being sacrificed for the greater good. That’s another reason he’s the best assistant she’s ever had. 

“We need to stop a ritual which will end the world,” she tells Jon. 

He slowly puts his cup onto the desk. There’s curiosity in his eyes, but he knows better than to ask. “All right. Should I go pack?”

“Yes.” Gertrude pauses. “Make sure to dress warm.”


	2. Chapter Two: Jon

Jon doesn’t like Peter Lukas.

The man is polite enough, but something in Lukas’ pale eyes-- if Jon was prone to dramatics, he’d say they’re the grey-blue of the sea ice covering the ship’s rigging-- sets Jon on edge. He finds himself avoiding the ship’s captain.

Gertrude says nothing and betrays less, which does not come as a surprise. Still, as both land and warmth become ever more distant, Jon finds himself craving even banal conversation. He refuses to seek it out. 

All the while, Lukas watches both Jon and the sea with the same curious and vague amusement.

No, Jon doesn’t care for Peter Lukas. But it doesn’t matter. All that matters is whatever is at the end of this journey. Sannikov Land, wherever-- or whatever-- that might be. Jon isn’t doing this for Gertrude (at least not entirely). He’s doing this because saving the world, protecting people from things not even he can understand, is the only reason he’s still alive. 

Jon stares out over a sea he knows is on no map and thinks, bitterly, that he never had an actual choice about this… _mission_. He’s not stupid. He knows Gertrude isn’t telling him everything, and he knows whatever awaits him at Sannikov Land is likely deadly. 

He was always going to say yes.

“We’ll be there before nightfall,” Lukas calls from the prow of the ship. When Jon turns, he sees a slight smile on Lukas’ face.

The chill which runs down his spine has little to do with the temperature.

“Good,” Gertrude murmurs. Jon is wearing two coats and is still shivering. He can only imagine how cold the air must be to Gertrude, who, as formidable as she is, is much more fragile than he. She appears unaffected by the cold, however.

Jon shoves his hands deeper into his jacket pockets and goes back to scanning the horizon.

They hear the laughter before they see the island. The sound grates across Jon’s eardrums, somehow both painful and intoxicating. 

Jon thinks, somewhat randomly, of the statement regarding Grifter’s Bone. He shakes his head as if to shake away the thought.

“You all right?” Gertrude asks. 

The laughter rises in octave and volume before dropping to an almost inaudible hum. 

“What’s on that island, Gertrude?” 

She contemplates him. Jon waits. She sighs, her breath crystallizing in the air. “The Great Twisting, Jon. Meant to bring a great evil into the world. You will know more as we approach the center of the ritual.”

Jon nods like that statement clarified things. 

“You will understand,” Gertrude tells him. “I promise.”

The island is cold. Standing on it, Jon can tell it is also profoundly _wrong_. 

“This place doesn’t exist,” he says. 

“Correct.” Lukas loops a rope around a frozen dead tree. “I’ll wait here, Gertrude.”

She nods and begins walking towards the laughter. Jon trails behind, caught up in a strange, disturbing joy.

The laughter is rising in volume again. It no longer hurts. Jon finds himself smiling so widely his face hurts as he follows Gertrude up a nonexistent spiraling staircase. 

He doesn’t know when they arrive at the top. All he knows is the bubbling ecstasy inside of him. It drags his concentration away from the impossible edifice they’re climbing. The laughter doesn’t make his head hurt anymore, but looking at the structure makes his head ache with near-blinding pain. 

Jon doesn’t know when they arrive at the top, but they do. He doesn’t notice Gertrude opening the door, either, but she does. 

He comes back to himself enough to take the map she hands him. 

“You can stop all of this by walking through that door and tearing out the Spiral’s heart,” she says. 

Jon nods. Gertrude pauses. 

“You won’t make it out alive.” 

Jon would like to think he hears a trace of regret in her voice. He knows better. The smile on his face stretches wider.

“Good.” 

He steps through the door. 

The laughter echoes through the vast, neon hallway Jon is standing in. He turns. The door is gone. Behind him, the hallway stretches on as far as he can see. 

He turns around again. There are now three hallways branching away in front of him. All of them go to the left. 

Jon looks down, doing his best to ignore the swirling patterns of the carpet, and stares at the map. Doing so sends a spike of pain through his skull. He blinks the tears of pain away and looks up to see the number of hallways in front of him have multiplied.

Somehow, he finds the door he entered through on the map. The heart of the thing-- hadn’t Gertrude called it the Spiral?-- is located in the center of the maze. 

He pushes past the pain behind his eyes long enough to figure out that he’s supposed to turn around and walk until the hallway begins to narrow, and then take the third right.

Jon has no idea how he knows this. He has no better options, though, so he turns around and begins walking. 

The bright fractals which spin across the walls, floor, and ceiling make Jon’s head pulse with agony. He closes his eyes, but all that does is project the spirals onto the inside of his eyelids. 

Jon resigns himself to a terrible headache and keeps walking. 

Time blurs. At first, Jon checks his watch often. He ignores his digital watch becoming an analog, but after he catches the hour hand spinning backwards, he resigns himself to losing track of time.

He doesn’t remember the last time he wasn’t laughing. His nose drips blood onto the map. Shouldn’t that much blood loss kill him? Please let it kill him.

Jon no longer feels hunger or thirst. His headache is either gone or too painful to understand. His cracked lips drop blood onto the map. 

The map is made of blood.

Everything is made of blood.

Everything is made of fractals. Bright, spinning fractals, made of his blood. His blood is made of fractals.

Everything is a spiral. Nothing is a spiral.

The map lies. The map is the only truth.

Nothing is real. 

Jon stumbles into the heart of the Spiral.

All he can remember is _tear out the heart and you can die._

The heart is almost simple, compared to the hallways. If Jon tilts his head just right, he can pretend it is, anyway.

Jon lifts the heart out of the Mandelbrot sequence it’s nestled in. It pulses in his hands. He digs his fingers in and begins to rip it apart. 

The fractals which slide from the beating heart writhe across his hands, spilling impossibly neon light across the room. He ignores them, caught up in trying to scratch his fingernails across the slick almost-muscles on the inside of the heart. 

The almost-muscle twists away beneath his touch. Jon digs further inside the heart and finds his arms buried inside of it.

The light spilling from inside the heart slides into his mouth and he’s too busy laughing to scream as it burns into his blood. 

(When his laughter begins to slow, the thing which was once Jonathan Sims is _angry_.

The Archivist betrayed him. 

He was supposed to die.)


	3. Chapter Three: Martin

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: I’m not British, so if any dialogue/narration is, uh, jarring, that’s why.  
> A decent chunk of this is based on Episode 26 (A Distortion).  
> In this chapter, Martin’s using it/its pronouns for the Distortion-- as well as referring to Jon as “the thing”-- but after this Jon will be referred to as he/his. (I don’t really like it/its pronouns, myself, so I figured I’d put in a PSA here.)  
> Thank you so much for everyone who commented on the last two chapters!

When Martin first sees the-- the _thing_ , his first reaction is irritation. 

Fear follows it immediately, of course, because he still has some remaining survival instinct, but still. He’s just escaped Jane Prentiss, he’s been living out of the Archives for like a month, all he wants is a coffee, and now there’s _this_ to deal with.

Martin steps into the meager shelter of the nearest doorway, takes a deep breath, and considers his options. He could go back to the relative safety of the Archives. He could just turn around and walk right back to the break room. He’s been dealing with shitty coffee this long, he can deal with it for another day. 

Yeah. That’s what he should do. 

Martin sneaks another look through the slightly warped window of the coffee shop. Yep, the thing is still there. If he tilts his head to the right, looking through the flat side of the window, the thing looks like a normal guy. _A handsome guy, at that_ , Martin thinks, and then blushes furiously. He’s going to blame that thought on his month of forced isolation. 

With his head at this angle, all Martin sees is a tall, probably too-thin man wearing a nice cardigan, his long, dark hair a little messy and streaked through with gray. 

_Maybe I was just… mistaken?_

Martin tilts his head to the left, looking through the bubbled part of the window, and bites down hard on his lip. 

_Nope._

The thing is still tall and thin, but more so, somehow, as if it’s been… stretched. It is rail-thin; its limbs and body are almost wavy, like there are either too many or too few bones inside. Martin can’t see its face, but even if the thing has a face, all of Martin’s attention is focused on its hands. They’re almost the size of its torso, the fingers long, stiff, and ending in sharp points, and there appear to be far too many joints inside of each finger.

Martin swallows hard, turns on his heel, and tries not to run as he hurries back towards the Institute. 

He tells Sasha about it, of course-- she’s the Head Archivist, she’s the one who’s supposed to deal with these things-- but she seems doubtful.

“Are you sure it wasn’t just a trick of the light?” 

“Yes,” Martin snaps. “Like I said, I know what I saw.”

Sasha sighs. Her hair is pulled back haphazardly, a pencil stuck into it to hold her bun in place. There are pronounced dark circles under her eyes. 

She looks exhausted. 

_Well, join the club_ , Martin thinks, and then feels guilty. He knows she has a lot on her plate. 

Still, he’s a bit annoyed with her at the moment.

“Tell you what,” Sasha says. “I’ll go with you, we’ll get you that coffee, and if tall, dark, and monster is still around, we’ll deal with it together.”

“I mean, I appreciate it, but what exactly are you planning on doing if it's there? I mean, if it’s anything like Prentiss was…”

She shrugs. “I’ve got some pepper spray and a taser. I figure that’s a good start.”

Martin opens his mouth to ask how Sasha got a taser, sees the glint in her eyes, and closes it again. 

“Right, then.” Sasha stands up. “Just let me get my coat.”

The thing is gone when Sasha and Martin arrive. Martin can’t decide if he’s relieved or disappointed. 

“It was there,” Martin insists in a whisper as they leave. “I swear.”

“I believe you,” Sasha says. 

_Do you?_ Martin questions, but he takes a sip of coffee instead of saying it out loud. It burns his tongue. 

“The important thing is it’s gone now,” Sasha adds as she opens the Institute doors. 

“Right.”

Martin sleeps with one hand on his knife and the other on his corkscrew that night.

Martin lasts another three days before he breaks down and decides he needs to go back. He curses himself the entire walk to Tim’s desk ( _this is the exact same thing that got you in trouble with the crazy murdering bug lady, Martin, do you really want to go through that again? No, you don’t, you_ idiot _, so if you don’t_ turn around right now _\--_ ) but he keeps walking.

“Tim?” 

Tim glances up from the statement he’s frowning over. “Yeah?”

“Want to go get a coffee? From that place around the corner?”

Tim raises one eyebrow, shrugs, and stands. “Sure. I’m not one to turn down an excuse to miss work.”

Martin forces a half-smile. 

Tim keeps up a steady stream of chatter on the way to the coffee shop. It’s mostly about his past few flings, with the occasional disparaging comment about Elias or statements thrown in. Martin nods when it seems like he’s supposed to and tunes most of it out. Hearing another person speak, even if their conversation is as inane as Tim’s is, is soothing, but all Martin can focus on is the window they’re approaching. 

The thing is there again. 

Martin squares his shoulders and walks into the coffee shop. He ignores it; it watches him, but says nothing; Tim doesn’t seem to notice anything.

Martin makes a note of the cafe’s hours and follows Tim back to the Institute. The hair on the back of his neck stands up the whole way.

He goes back to the coffee shop around eight that evening. Sasha and Tim are both gone-- the light in Elias’ office is still on, but that’s nothing new-- so there’s no one to wonder where he’s going.

Grimly, Martin wonders if that means no one will wonder where he went if he vanishes. 

Again.

He’s pretty sure that Tim, at least, would notice if he just disappeared. Besides, he’d left a note on Sasha’s desk. 

“Went to talk to the monster in the coffee shop” was specific enough, right?

The thing is sitting by the window. Its distorted, impossibly long hands are resting on the table, covering the entirety of the table’s surface. The ends of its fingers dangle over the edge.

Martin’s throat goes dry. He marches inside anyway. The thing, which looks human without the window to look through, gestures to the seat across from it with an ostensibly normal hand. 

Martin very carefully keeps his knees well away from the edge of the table as he sits down. The ends of the thing’s fingers looked sharp enough to slice through skin like butter.

The thing across the table studies Martin with dark eyes. Martin shifts in his seat before clearing his throat. 

“What are you?”

The thing laughs. It sounds _wrong_ , like the laughter should be almost silent but someone turned the volume up enough for Martin to hear it. 

(Although Martin refuses to acknowledge the thought-- he is not going to worry about the welfare of this monster-- the laughter also sounds pained, as if it's being ripped out of the thing’s lungs.)

“It doesn’t matter what I am,” it said. “And, even if it did, and even if I wanted to, I couldn’t describe it… How would a melody describe itself, if asked?”

Martin makes no effort to disguise his irritation. “If you’re going to just talk in, in, _cheap riddles_ , then I’m just going to leave.”

The thing blinks. “I… I apologize.” It almost seems sincere. “You can… you can call me Jonathan.”

Martin does not want to call this thing Jonathan. It doesn’t seem to fit it, somehow, and something about the way it said the name makes him think “Jonathan” is definitely not its real name. Still, Martin has no other name for it.

“Alright, ‘Jonathan’,” Martin says. “What do you want?”

“To help,” Jonathan responds, and his too-wide smile shows far too many far too sharp teeth.


	4. Chapter Four: Martin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jon is… Jon. Martin doesn’t get paid enough for any of this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Even as an avatar of the Spiral, Jon stubbornly clung to his aloof and kind-of-a-dick persona. (I love the guy, but…)  
> This chapter was written mostly switching between my doc and the transcript for episode 26. The plot should diverge soon-ish.  
> Also, I know Martin would call it a “torch”, but I called it that for all of one line before I gave up and went back to "flashlight".  
> I’m going to try to post a chapter every Monday. Thank you so much to everyone who’s commented, subscribed, etc.! I love knowing people are enjoying this fic :)

“Help with what, exactly?” Martin sputtered. “Jane?” As terrifying as the entity sitting across from him was, if he-- he? Martin didn’t like calling people ‘it’, so he decided to go with ‘he’, even if Jonathan wasn’t exactly human-- could help get rid of Jane, Martin would take him any day.

Jonathan laughed again. Martin winced as the sound scraped across his eardrums. 

“You understand nothing whatsoever, do you, Martin?”

Martin was caught between indignation and fear. Then again, that had been his state since he first saw this entity through the cafe window.

“I, uh, I don’t think I ever told you my name.”

Martin couldn’t keep his eyes on Jonathan’s face for more than a few seconds, but he rather thought the entity was scowling.

“Are you truly so oblivious to the nature of your situation that you believe I need you to tell me that information?”

The last shreds of Martin’s self-preservation deserted him. He glared at Jonathan. “I’m not actually an idiot, you know.”

Jonathan rolled his eyes. Or possibly his neck. Martin couldn’t tell because his vision dissolved into neon spirals at the entity’s movement. While he was blinking the spots from his eyes, Jonathan’s tone was even more irritated.

“I do not care if you or your companions live or die. The flesh-hive is always rash, however, and I do so enjoy upsetting its plans.”

_ Flesh-hive? _

Martin just… decided not to ask about that one. “If you don’t care whether we live or die, then why are you here?”

“I would like to be… friends.”

Martin laughed. He couldn’t help it. His tolerance for absurdity was much higher than it had been even a month ago, but this situation was beyond even his capacity to deal with.

Jonathan’s face cracked into a smile, but his voice was tinged with a threat when he asked, “Did I miss something?”

Martin’s common sense finally kicked in and he swallowed the last of his hysterical laughter. 

“You want to be friends?” 

“Yes. Do try to keep up.” The entity’s (seemingly) human fingers tapped impatiently on the table; in unison with the tapping, holes gouged themselves into the table. Martin swallowed. Apparently being unable to see Jonathan’s inhuman fingers didn’t mean they weren’t still there. “If you wish to save yourself-- as well as the lives of Sasha James and Timothy Stoker-- you will meet me at Hanwell Cemetery. Or you could follow me now, I suppose.”

Martin knew better than to ask how Jonathan knew his friends’ names. “You seriously expect me to just… follow you to a cemetery?”

“It’s not as if you have anything better to do.”

“I--”

“Do you really want to risk the Archivist’s life-- and Timothy’s too, I suppose-- because you want to get your usual cup of tea before you try and fail to sleep on your cot?”

“How--”

Jonathan stood, blurring as he did so. Martin’s eyes watered in response and he looked away.

“Follow or don’t. Let your friends die or don’t. I don’t care.” 

Martin tried to think of what Sasha would say, but all he could think of was her weary, disbelieving face when he had told her of the entity before him. 

He couldn’t face her with the knowledge that he’d walked away from this out of fear. He couldn’t risk letting Tim and Sasha die because he was afraid.

(And oh, Martin was terrified. He’d been scared to death since he went to that basement and found Jane Prentiss.

But he couldn’t walk away from this, no matter how afraid he was.)

Jonathan was turning away. 

“Wait,” Martin said, scrambling out of his seat. “I’m coming.”

“I am aware,” Jonathan drawled. The last syllable of “aware” echoed across the cafe and the barista behind the counter dropped a jug of milk. The spilled milk floated upwards and splattered against the ceiling. 

Jonathan kept walking. Martin followed, shooting an apologetic glance back at the barista. She was frozen in place, staring at the puddle above her. 

Had the door behind her been there before?

Jonathan was striding away from the cafe. 

“You remind me of my boss Elias,” Martin muttered, jogging a few steps to catch up.

Jonathan ignored him. 

“And friends usually care about each other's lives, by the way.”

“Utterly fascinating, I'm sure.”

Martin took the hint and stopped talking. 

They passed the graveyard Jonathan had spoken of, but instead of going in, Jonathan walked down the road towards a row of houses. The sign on the road said Azalea Close. Martin thought about texting his location to either Sasha or Tim, in case this was an elaborate murder setup. His hand was on his phone when he glanced down and saw Jonathan’s reflection in a puddle. 

The entity’s warped body and swollen, bony hands put thoughts of communication out of Martin’s head. Jonathan could effortlessly cut through a table with the ends of his fingers. Martin didn’t want him anywhere near Sasha or Tim. Even if this was all an elaborate murder setup. 

Most of the buildings on this street looked well-maintained enough-- Martin really didn’t want to be murdered in suburbia-- but there was what looked like an abandoned pub at the end. The walls were covered in graffiti and there were metal sheets over the windows. 

It looked exactly like the kind of place people got murdered in.

_ Right. Nobody will find my body in there. Wonderful. _

The door was open and swinging back and forth. Jonathan strode through the doorway with irritation in every wavering line of his body. Martin looked at it, wondered if his mother would come to his funeral, and followed the entity.

The inside of the pub was quite dark. Whatever sunlight which may have lit the interior of the building during the day was long gone and Martin was glad for the torch in his pocket, small and dim as it was. Worm-inspired paranoia came in useful on occasion.

He swept his flashlight’s beam around the building’s interior. There was no doubt this had been a bar. The bartop even seemed to be relatively intact, as did the small builder’s kit on top of it. Martin considered checking for any intact bottles-- it had been a hell of a week and there wasn’t exactly a bar in the Archives-- but was distracted by a low, wet, horribly familiar groan from the other side of the room, just outside the range of Martin’s light. 

Martin tilted his flashlight downwards, already knowing what he would see. 

There was a pale worm there. 

Martin looked to Jonathan wildly. Or tried to, anyway. The light from his flashlight seemed to just  _ miss _ the entity, illuminating only Jonathan’s dark, flaring eyes and bright, wide smile. 

A cold certainty settled over Martin, mixing with the panic surging through him. He would get no help from Jonathan, just as he had gotten no help from Sasha or Elias. He would die or live on his own.

Martin scrambled backwards and slipped on a loose piece of wood. His elbow slammed into the bar. His grip went loose. The flashlight rolled across the bar, its light flickering over a mass of writhing worms. Martin grasped after it desperately and his hand closed around something cold and metal. 

The fire extinguisher. 

He pulled the pin on instinct. Through the gibbering panic which had taken over his brain, Martin questioned what the hell he thought a fire extinguisher was going to do, but he was already squeezing the handle. 

The weak light of the flashlight was just enough for Martin to see the worms recoiling, shriveling, and… dying?

Martin stepped forward, his shoes making sickening squishing sounds as he crushed the bodies of the worms beneath them. He picked up the flashlight and walked towards the area where he’d heard the groan. 

It wasn’t Prentiss. Just something which had once been a man. “Flesh-hive”, Jonathan had called it. Martin studiously did not think about himself in this man’s place. 

The gas engulfed the man; he shuddered violently and was still.

Martin dropped the fire extinguisher. He was dizzy from the carbon dioxide, but he felt that he owed it to the dead man to know his name. 

The wallet was stained with substances Martin didn’t want to think too hard about, but the name of the driver’s license was still legible: Timothy Hodges.

Martin’s attention was pulled from the wallet by a sharp pain in his right arm. He looked up to see Jonathan reaching  _ into _ his shoulder. 

As he screamed, Martin thought back to the holes in the cafe table. He’d been right about how easily Jonathan’s fingers could cut his skin.

Jonathan withdrew his hand after a few seconds. Pinched between his fingers was a single silver worm that Martin hadn’t even felt burrow into his skin. 

Martin threw up. 

That was the last thing he remembered clearly before walking into the room he slept in and passing out on his cot.


	5. Chapter Five: Sasha//Georgie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As always, Sasha and Georgie are the only ones in this story with common sense.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for all of your comments! I won’t be responding to all of them (there’s so many!) but I read every single one and they all make me smile like crazy.  
> Because the headcanon that Jon was in a punk band in uni is just too great to pass up I threw in a reference to that, which led to one of the best mental images I’ve ever come up with (Spiral!Jon accidentally becoming the lead singer of a punk band again).  
> Note on structure-- two slashes (//) denote a POV change.

“And that’s the last thing I remember before getting back here,” Martin finished. He was shaking again, his fingers laced around a cup of tea like it was the only thing keeping the world together. “I mean, I couldn’t really call the police, could I? Not with everything. So here we are.”

“Yes,” Sasha said. “I suppose we are.” 

There was silence for a moment. She watched the tape spin and thought of spirals. 

“So… what do you think?” Martin asked. He raised his cup to his lips, but his trembling hands resulted in the tea spilling down the front of his sweater. “Shit. Oh, sorry, sorry, I just--”

“It’s quite alright, Martin. I’m not exactly known for my spotless language myself.” Sasha pulled a few tissues from the box on her desk and offered them to him. He took them with a small smile and dabbed at the spill. They both knew it wouldn’t do much to limit the damage, but there was something reassuring in trying.

Sasha ordered herself firmly to stop creating metaphors-- that was the problem with having studied literature in university, it became a habit-- and said, “To answer your question, I… I don’t know, to be perfectly honest with you. It just seems… I just don’t think this job is _safe_. We should really all just quit.”

Martin looked down at the tea-soaked tissues in his hands. “I don’t-- that’s not an option for me. Not with Prentiss out there.”

Sasha winced. Caught up in Martin’s story as she was, she had almost forgotten about his situation. If she hadn’t asked him to come work for her… 

“But you could quit,” Martin continued. “Do you want to?”

“No.” She didn’t know she was going to say it until she did, but she knew it was true. “No, I don’t. I’m just… I’m just too damned curious, I suppose.”

“Yeah,” Martin said, less to Sasha than to himself. “Yeah, I know the feeling.” 

The door closed behind him with a soft click. Sasha hoped he would at least be able to get some more rest.

“Statement ends,” she told the tape recorder. She took a sip from her own cup and made a face-- the tea had gone cold. “Obviously, there is very little we can do to follow up on Martin’s, ah, experience, besides perhaps to keep an eye out for… worm-riddled corpses. Or, I suppose, more worm-riddled corpses.” Sasha couldn’t help but give a borderline-hysterical chuckle at that. 

“I believe him, of course--” how could she not, seeing the fear in his face, watching how his hand crept to his shoulder in memory? “--but…” Sasha trailed off, sighing. 

She cleared her throat and moved on. “This does at least explain what happened to Timothy Hodge, whose disappearance shortly after making his statement in late 2014 has been something of a concern since I discovered it. It seems odd how different the effect of Prentiss’… infestation was on him and Harriet Lee, but without more information, I don’t have a working theory on why that might have been.”

More information. Again, just like every other time, she needed more information. Since that first statement, it had felt as though all she’d been doing was looking for the puzzle piece that would make everything fit together and coming up with more missing pieces instead. 

“Lord, enough with the metaphors already, Archivist,” she muttered to herself. Then, louder, for the tape recorder, “The thing that most disquiets me about Martin’s statement is this ‘Jonathan’. Martin seems pretty convinced that he was not human, at least not in the conventional sense, and considering that ‘Jonathan’ has, er, knife hands, I cannot disagree with Martin’s assessment. 

“Almost every statement I’ve catalogued has engaged with the paranormal in some form of antagonistic relationship. The idea that there are things out there like that that want to help us… For some reason, that makes me more uncomfortable than the worm-infested creature stalking the Institute. Although Martin does not seem to share the sentiment, and perhaps I should trust his instincts here, considering he is the only one to have encountered both of the relevant creatures. 

“I’ll speak to Elias about getting some extra carbon dioxide fire extinguishers for the archives.” She contemplated her fingernails. “And perhaps look up if tasers work on worms.” She was really rather fond of her taser. 

Sasha turned her attention to the tape recorder once more. The tape spun endlessly in circles, doing nothing but recording stories, never putting anything together, being moved around and used by forces it could never hope to understand.

“Statement ends.”

Sasha didn’t know why she picked Paul McKenzie’s statement, just that she was walking through storage and thinking about ‘Jonathan’ when she did.

Paul McKenzie’s door had neither a keyhole or lock.

Sasha bit her lip and decided not to mention the door Martin had seen appear behind the barista. 

She just needed more information. Eternally, more information.

“Statement ends,” Sasha said, and she forcefully turned off the tape recorder before she could voice any suspicions she had about doors.

//

Georgie had been seeing doors where there shouldn’t have been any, lately. Sometimes they appeared in the middle of her walls, sometimes they were in alleys or below bridges, sometimes they disappeared when she looked at them straight.

She didn’t open them.

She told herself she doesn’t want to.

Every time she passed one, she caught the faint scent of cigarette smoke.

Georgie didn’t cry much, but the way her flat smelled like cigarette smoke when she woke up almost did it.

It had been more than a year since Jon disappeared-- not that she’d been keeping track-- and Georgie still couldn’t smell smoke without thinking about him. Every memory of him she’d held onto-- when he kissed her for the first time, shy and sweet and a little clumsy; when she woke up to find him perched on the windowsill, shaking, a bottle of whiskey on the floor and his cigarette trailing smoke out the window; when he ran into her lecture, breathless, to bring her a textbook she forgot; when their band’s first paid gig went well and he picked her up and spun her in a circle, laughing, the liquid eyeliner he’d applied somehow still flawless-- every damn one was shot through with the smell of cigarette smoke.

Georgie didn’t miss him-- well, she did, but not like-- it was just-- he’d been--

She buried her face in the Admiral’s fur and let herself think about it, about _him,_ for the space of ten breaths. Then Georgie threw back her covers and rolled out of bed with the vague intention of taking a shower.

Jon was sitting on her windowsill, a cigarette held a few inches from his lips between two knife-like fingers.

Georgie closed her eyes, took three more deep breaths, and opened them again. Jon was still there.

She was not afraid, because she didn’t know how to be anymore. But she was… unnerved, perhaps. Confused. 

The Admiral didn’t share her hesitation, though. He was out of bed like a shot and jumping into Jon’s lap before Georgie could decide if she wanted to stop him. 

Jon smiled down at the cat. It was a smile that probably should have scared Georgie-- there were far too many teeth in it, and it was far too wide-- but it just heightened her certainty that this was real. There was a hint of how Jon used to smile in it, a certain hint of uncertainty and discomfort that always made her heart twinge. 

“Um… hi, Georgie,” Jon said, the Admiral purring on his lap, and oh, knife hands or not, this was definitely Jon. 

Georgie smiled.

“Hey, Jon.”

Georgie made coffee, because she wasn’t sure what else to do. It was not often a (presumed) dead ex appeared in her bedroom with knife hands. Jon watched her with eyes that made Georgie’s vision slide sideways if she looked at them too long. He petted the Admiral all the while, stroking the cat with the back of his hand.

“So, are you dead?” Georgie asked, sliding a cup of coffee towards him. It had just a splash of cream in it, the way he used to like it. “Or maybe a ghost? I could put you on my podcast.”

The sound Jon made was not a laugh. “Jonathan Sims died on an island that does not exist. I am the thing which was once Jonathan Sims. The thing made of whatever scraps of him survived the endless hallways.”

Georgie dumped a spoonful of sugar into her coffee. _Fucking philosophy majors._ “So… you’re not dead.”

“Nor am I alive.”

“It’s three in the morning, Jon, I’m not debating this.”

Jon not-laughed again. “I think Jon missed you.”

Georgie took a long sip of her coffee, ignoring the fact that it was too hot for comfort. She was developing a headache which had little to do with her lack of sleep. “Why are you here?”

Jon tilted his head. His neck was too long. The Admiral, bored, jumped off of his lap and wandered away towards the living room. 

“You aren’t afraid.”

“No.”

“How?”

Georgie shrugged. “Are you trying to make me afraid?”

Jon shrugged back. His shoulders each bent in about four too many places. Georgie swallowed her nausea down with another sip of coffee. 

He said, “I wanted to see if Jon remembered right.”

“If you remembered _what_ \--”

The yellow door creaked shut behind him before Georgie could finish her question. She didn’t even see it appear. It disappeared when she blinked.

The cup of coffee she’d given Jon-- the thing which was once Jon-- was sitting on the table. It was ice cold and, surrounding the cup, there were inch-deep gashes carved into her table. Five of them. They looked like a handprint if she tilted her head. 

Georgie exhaled hard and took another sip of coffee.

The smell of cigarette smoke lingered on her clothes for the rest of the week.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Stay safe and have a good week!


	6. Chapter Six: Sasha

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sasha receives two strange visitors.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, for the record, yumantimatter and I totally called the Archivist!Sasha thing. 161 did kind of throw things off, though, so I had to improvise a bit with this ‘verse. If you haven’t listened to 161, you might want to do that before you read this, as I didn’t feel like copying in all of the information referenced.  
> There’s nothing of the Stranger wandering around the Archives in this verse, btw.  
> Spot the title inspiration!  
> (Also, I realized I switched tenses after Chapter Three… Sorry about that. I’ll fix it at some point.)  
> Thanks for reading and I hope you like it!

Sasha watched Helen Richardson scribble frantically and prepared herself for another long day.

“Statement of Helen Richardson, regarding, uh… how would you describe it?”

Richardson’s scratching continued unabated. Sasha cleared her throat. “Ms. Richardson?”

Richardson nodded jerkily. Her eyes stayed on the paper. “Uh, what?”

“Your-- your experience, how would you summarize it?” Sasha held more questions back with effort. She felt sympathy for this woman-- Richardson had obviously been through something very disturbing, or else was very disturbed-- but she also had a lot of statements to read. Besides, whatever Richardson was drawing was giving Sasha a headache. 

“Um, well, I’ve been, I’ve been trying to draw you a map, but it doesn’t, it doesn’t _work_.” Richardson was breathing hard. Her pen scraped across the paper with even more pressure as she finished speaking.

“... Right. Statement of Helen Richardson, regarding, uh, a new door in a house she was selling. Statement recorded direct from subject--” _such as she is_ , Sasha thought-- “Second October, 2016. Statement begins.”

Sasha waited, not very hopefully. Richardson continued pressing the pen’s point onto the paper with enough force Sasha was sure the recording would heavily feature the sound of its scratching. 

“Miss Richardson?”

The pen stopped. Sasha nearly sighed in relief at the noise’s cessation. Her relief didn’t last long. 

“There’s no left turns. Look.” Richardson brandished the paper. “Look, _none_ , it just, it just turns right, it doesn’t make any sense--” she flattened the paper on the desk in front of her again. “No, it wasn’t a spiral because you could, you could always go forward, I mean, I--”

Sasha sighed heavily. She felt bad about it, but she was nearing the end of her patience. Tim had been asking questions again, Martin had misfiled a year’s worth of statements-- Sasha knew he had lied on his CV and didn’t usually hold it against him, because she’d been a young person who needed a job once too, and he was quite nice, but _really_ , Martin, sorting statements _alphabetically_ ?-- and Elias was being even more cryptic than usual. Now there was this woman, who just refused to make _sense_. Sasha would have made Tim deal with Richardson if she hadn’t mentioned her damn _door_.

“--I, I did _mostly_ , just forward, and the paths never got _shorter,_ like you were coming to a center, they just-- kept going-- it doesn’t, doesn’t make any sense!” Richardson brandished her “map” once more. “Look at it--”

 _As if anything else you’ve done has made sense,_ Sasha thought. Out loud, she said, “You’re right, Ms. Richardson. This map doesn’t make any sense.”

“After a few turns--”

“--It becomes a mess of impossible lines, yes. But it will be very useful to our investigation if you could start at the beginning, give us some context.” 

Richardson’s chin jutted out and she picked up her pen again. Irritated, Sasha allowed some command to slip into her tone.

“ **Tell me how it got started**.”

“What do you want to know? There wasn’t a door. Then there was.” Richardson paused as Sasha’s words seemed to sink in. 

When she continued, she was giving a proper statement.

 _Finally_. Sasha steepled her fingers and listened.

When Richardson spoke of the man who had taken her last viewing appointment, Sasha swallowed hard but did not interrupt. 

“He wasn’t that tall, maybe five and a half feet or so? Maybe taller. It was hard to tell. Anyway, he wasn’t tall, but he stood so still when I answered the door he seemed… threatening, somehow. He had long, dark hair that was beginning to grey, and his eyes were… dark. Too dark. Way too dark. I asked him if he was Mr. Lombardi…”

Richardson went on to talk about protocol with clients. Sasha, on the edge of her seat waiting for more relevant details, didn’t care. 

“I held up my arm for a handshake, but he just looked at it, and laughed, keeping his hands firmly by his side. That was when I first started to think something was wrong, because his laugh… didn’t sound right? I don’t know how to describe it, but it wasn’t, it wasn’t a _human_ laugh.”

No. No, Sasha was pretty sure it hadn’t been.

Richardson-- at last-- spoke of a yellow door which had not been there before.

“I had been up on that landing _dozens_ of times already, and I _definitely_ did not remember it being there. It wasn’t, wasn’t just that I hadn’t _noticed_ it, you have to understand that, it _wasn’t there._ It _couldn’t_ have _been_ there, I checked the floor plan I had with me, and obviously--” Richardson laughed anxiously-- “there was _no door_ shown on it, it was an _exterior wall_ on the _second floor,_ there _can’t_ have been anything beyond it but _empty_ air.” Richardson let out the same laugh. It made Sasha’s hair stand on end. “And a _significant_ drop, except that I had made _several_ circuits of the outside while showing off the garden.” 

Tears sparkled in the real estate agent’s eyes. Sasha considered offering a tissue, but Richardson kept going before she could make up her mind. “And there was _absolutely no door_ visible there, it was just a dark yellow door that couldn’t _be_ there.”

Sasha almost wanted to warn Richardson not to open the door. She was right there with Richardson in the past, now, watching the real estate agent’s hand reach for the yellow door’s matte-black doorknob. 

She almost warned her. Really, she did. But Sasha had to know.

“It opened slowly, but deliberately, like… it was keen for me to go inside.”

 _I imagine it was,_ Sasha mused. _No-- I imagine_ ** _he_ **_was._

Richardson continued on, stammering about windowless hallways which curved, very gradually and always to the left, about paintings of those corridors and identical hallways which branched off to the right. About colors and time which defied explanation. About inhuman, distorted figures and mirrors and escapes.

Sasha drank it all in, the information and the terror on Richardson’s face equally satisfying. 

As Richardson came to the end of her statement, she was crying. Sasha nudged the box of tissues closer to her. With a grateful smile, the real estate agent blew her nose. 

“Finally, after the latest bout of nightmares, I decided to come to you and tell my story. Maybe you can make sense of this.”

 _Statement ends_ , Sasha concluded. Out loud, she said, “Perhaps. Leave it with us. We’ll… do some digging and see what we can find.”

“You believe me, then?”

“I… yes. Yes, I think I do.” _God help me, I think I do_. “One thing, though. You say you don’t remember the man’s name...”

“I… I think he told me, but just, I…”

Sasha cut her off. “It wasn’t Jonathan, was it?”

“Yes! _Jonathan!_ That was it!” Richardson’s voice was decidedly vengeful when she asked, “Do you _know_ him?”

“Maybe,” Sasha said, because it was the truth. “We’ll make some inquiries and get back to you, Ms. Richardson. Thank you for your time.”

“Right, well… I’ll just leave you to it, then.”

Helen Richardson left Sasha’s office. 

Absently, Sasha noticed that her door seemed more squeaky than usual. Perhaps the hinges needed to be oiled. 

Sasha thought about calling Martin in but decided against it. He would have told her if he’d heard from Jonathan again. Besides, she had his tape, should she need it.

Her office door was open. Frowning, Sasha got up to close it.

“Are you even aware how many lies you’re being told?’

Sasha whirled around. A man was in her office, his back to her as he rifled through her filing cabinets. Her hand inched towards the desk drawer which contained her taser, but she spoke politely. 

“I’m sorry, I don’t-- Can I _help_ you? This place is off-limits.”

“I disagree.”

“Who let you in here?” If it had been either of her assistants, there would be _blood._

“‘Let’?” 

The man laughed. The sound was doubled, nearly imperceptibly, as if he was laughing from more than one throat, a fraction of a second out-of-sync with himself. “I’m afraid that isn’t how this works.”

Sasha stopped thinking of her taser. “You’re him.”

“Yes.”

“Jonathan.”

Jonathan thought about it. “That _is_ a real name, I suppose. It will serve.”

“Are you here to kill me?” Sasha asked before she could think better of it.”

“No.”

“Oh… Why are, why are you here? Why--”

“I have a tape for you.” Jonathan’s hand reached into his inside jacket pocket. It emerged with a tape and set it on Sasha’s desk. “Play it for me, will you? Technology doesn’t much care for me, but you should be able to make it work.”

Sasha bit her lip but pulled out a tape player. 

_Too damn curious_ , she lectured herself furiously as she hit play on the tape. _Too damn curious for your own damn good, Sasha James._

When Gertrude’s voice filled her office, Sasha’s hands went white on the edge of her desk. She sat down hard when Gertrude told her she was now a ritual. By the time Gertrude finished, Sasha was shaking.

“I wish I had more time to explain it to you. But time is short, and hopefully my actions tonight will ensure that this tape never needs to see the light of day.

“But if you are hearing it, then-- good luck. Do what you have to do.”

Jonathan stabbed his finger through the tape recorder-- and the tape. The machine emitted a horrible hissing noise before going silent.

“The fuck was that for?” Sasha demanded, forgoing all remnants of professionalism in her anger. 

“The loss of this place would have unbalanced the struggle too early.” 

“That doesn’t answer the question.”

“I know,” Jonathan said. “Anything else? I’m well-fed and feeling generous.”

“Why are you really here?” Sasha spat.

He went unearthly still for a moment. Then his face cracked into a smile that made Sasha shudder. “Oh, very good, Archivist. I am simply collecting what is mine. The one who entered my domain.”

“Miss Richardson? You own those hallways?”

“What a _fascinating_ question.” The _f_ in _fascinating_ was drawn out for several seconds. “Does your _hand_ in any way own your stomach?”

Sasha wasn’t sure how to answer that one. “No? Ah--”

Jonathan swept on. “In any case, it doesn’t matter: the Wanderer had a brief respite, but it’s over now.”

A fierce protectiveness firmed Sasha’s spine. “Well, you’re too _late_ , she’s gone!”

Jonathan threw his head back and cackled. Sasha’s tea mug shattered. 

“Yes… ah… did you notice _which_ door she left through?” He continued laughing quietly.

Sasha glared at the remnants of her mug rather than risk looking at Jonathan. “Yes… wait, no, there was, there--”

Her office door had been open, she remembered. And the door Helen Richardson had left through had closed behind her.

“Let her go! Get her back here!”

Jonathan laughed again, that out-of-sync sound that grated over Sasha’s ears and gave her the same feeling as the sound of cracking ice did. “No. I don’t think I will.”

Sasha pulled her taser from her desk drawer.

Delighted, Jonathan asked, “Are you going to attack me?”

His hand flashed out and Sasha yelled in pain, dropping her weapon to the floor as the underside of her forearm was ripped open. 

He was still laughing. He raised an impossibly long, bloody finger to his mouth and swirled his tongue around it.

“Who the hell are you?”

“I am not a “who”, Archivist. I am a “what”. A “who” requires a degree of identity I can’t ever retain.”

“So…” It was hard to think. Sasha didn’t mind blood, per se, but she did mind that much of it dripping onto her desk. “So Jonathan isn’t your real name?”

“There is no such thing as a real name.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I am talking about myself. It’s not something I’m used to doing, so I’m sorry if I’m not very good at it.”

“You’re one of them, aren’t you?” Sasha realized. His talk of identities should have tipped her off sooner, but she would cut herself some slack considering the blood she was losing. “One of those… those fear-god things.”

Jonathan’s smile, bright and sharp, widened another few inches. 

“Which one are you? What do you do?”

He laughed and turned away.

 **“Which one are you?”** Sasha asked, and static buzzed over her tongue.

Jonathan looked at her, still facing away from her. Sasha tasted bile as she realized his neck had twisted 180 degrees.

“You’ll have to do better than that,” he said, his smile gone.

Jonathan vanished. 

Sasha collapsed into her chair and yelled, “Tim? Martin? I could do with a ride to the nearest hospital.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Stay safe and have a good week!


	7. Chapter Seven: Martin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Martin has a series of nocturnal encounters.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is slowly turning into an archivist!Sasha character study. I have no regrets. Y’all might by the time I’m finished, but I’m thriving in my hell hallways over here. *evil cackle*  
> PSA-- smoking is bad for you, kids. Even if Jon is smoking in, like, every scene in this fic.

Martin was so very tired. 

He hadn’t been able to sleep much, lately. Every time he tried, his vision flickered with silver worms, or his hearing rang with his mother’s recriminations, or he simply couldn’t.. 

He wasn’t sure if it qualified as insomnia. Martin was friends with Tim, and Tim had insomnia in spades. Real insomnia, that was, the kind of can’t-sleep-unless-you-fuck-or-drink-till-you-drop insomnia that made life nearly impossible to live normally. Martin had seen it first hand, and he knew that wasn’t what he had.

So what if he spent hours staring at the ceiling every night? So what if he found himself struggling to keep his mind on anything for more than a few minutes? So what if he was constantly exhausted and entirely too dependent upon caffeine?

Martin was just tired. So very tired. That was all. 

It was one forty-seven in the morning and Martin was finally beginning to drift off when the scent of cigarette smoke drifted into his half-dreams. 

Martin lay still, caught between paralyzing trepidation and a strange hope. There was a long, soft exhale from the direction of his window. The smell of smoke intensified.

“I don’t suppose you’ll go away and let me sleep?” Martin asked without opening his eyes.

“No.”

“Thought as much.” Martin gave up on sleep. He slid his glasses on and sat up. “Want some tea?”

Jonathan was perched on Martin’s tiny windowsill. His shadow sprawled across Martin’s bedroom floor in the dim streetlight.

The entity raised his cigarette to his lips. Martin reminded himself that smoking was _not sexy,_ damn it, but something about hands, even knife hands, and lips, and…

“Something wrong?” Jonathan inquired.

Martin flushed and dropped his gaze to the floor. The long, curling fingers of Jonathan’s shadow were splayed wide-- and reaching towards Martin. 

He jerked backward. Jonathan’s soft laughter filled the room. 

The entity’s hands were loose and by his sides.

“Tea,” Martin decided, shoving back his covers with shaking hands. His hands didn’t seem to stop shaking anymore, and this definitely wasn’t helping. “I want tea. Do you want tea? I don’t care, you’re getting tea.”

Jonathan’s unearthly laughter cut off so abruptly it reminded Martin of turning off a radio.

“And put that thing out,” Martin snapped, pointing a finger at the cigarette. “Lung cancer runs in my family.”

“Lung cancer would be a more merciful death than any other in your future.”

Martin took two mugs out of his cupboards and slammed them onto the counter. “Why do you have to do that? Be all, all, ominous and creepy every time I do anything?”

“I enjoy seeing how quickly I can raise your heart rate.”

Martin set the kettle on the stove, keeping his back to Jonathan, who had elected to sit on the kitchen counter. “Well, stop it, or you don’t get tea.”

“A fate worse than death.”

“And don’t you forget it.”

Jonathan’s wild laughter filled Martin’s apartment once more, but it no longer grated and scraped across Martin’s thoughts. It was still ever so slightly out-of-sync and staticky, but it felt almost… genuine.

“Tell me, Martin,” Jonathan murmured, drumming his fingers together. “Are you tired?”

His fingers made odd clacking noises when they touched. Martin couldn’t decide if the sound was more nails on a chalkboard or the dull thump of a baseball bat against meat.

Martin said, “Of course I am.”

“Why?”

“Because you woke me up with your riddles and cheap tricks.”

“You weren’t sleeping before, though,” Jonathan pointed out. He seemed to think it was a reasonable argument.

“I was a hell of a lot closer to sleeping before than I am now.”

Jonathan swung his legs. They didn’t reach the floor. Martin registered that information with a horrifying amount of affection. 

“You really should work on sleeping. Human brains are so very fragile.” 

Martin scoffed. He would blame his sleep deprivation for his lack of fear. “You really should work on your conversational skills.”

Jonathan looked insulted. He stayed for tea, though. And after he left-- unexpectedly and with no explanation, of course-- Martin managed to get his first few hours of good sleep in months. 

“You get laid or something?” Tim asked when Martin came in whistling.

“Nope,” Martin said cheerfully. He refused to let his mind stray to thoughts of cigarette smoke curling out of an inhuman mouth. “Just got a good night’s sleep.”

Tim refused to be deterred. “Because you got laid?”

“No! Why does your mind always jump to sex?”

“Because,” Tim said, grinning, “I know you don’t smoke.”

Martin felt himself blush. He’d noticed the smell of cigarettes in his flat this morning, but he hadn’t thought it was strong enough to cling to his clothes. “I-- we had tea and talked, all right? There was no _getting laid_ involved.”

“Uh-huh. I’m sure you had tea all night long.” Tim winked and walked off before Martin could compose a coherent retort. 

Martin recorded the statement of a woman with insomnia. She described a man who sounded an awful lot like Jonathan. 

He remembered Jonathan telling him to get some sleep and shuddered hard.

Human brains are so fragile, indeed.

Sasha called him and Tim into her office after the poor woman left.

“That was one of Jonathan’s victims,” Sasha said, stating the obvious. “He’s driving her insane.”

Martin shifted but said nothing. Beside him, Tim was bouncing his leg restlessly.

Sasha stood up and began pacing. Her office was not large, but it was ruthlessly organized-- a far cry from what it had looked like when Gertrude sat behind that desk-- and she strode back and forth unimpeded. 

Martin thought Sasha looked more exhausted than he did. 

“This time last year I would have dismissed her as a kook, wasting our time,” Sasha muttered. The pen holding her hair in a bun was sliding out. She didn’t seem to notice. “But a year changes a lot, and I now recognize the description of a man with dark, greying hair, strange hands, and an unnerving laugh all too well.”

So did Martin.

“Did Jonathan drive her to this? Another victim of his warped games? Or was he simply drawn like a vulture? Or maybe a shark sensing blood. What does he want from his victims?”

“I don’t know, but you’re supercharging my anxiety. Can you sit down?”

Sasha glared at Tim, who just raised his eyebrows. Martin thought, not for the first time, that Tim was a braver man than he would ever be.

After several seconds, she blew out a breath and collapsed into her chair, much to Martin’s relief. Being trapped in a room with an on-edge Sasha was almost more terrifying than being in one with Jonathan. 

“I’m sorry,” she said, pulling the pen out of her collapsing bun. “I just… Everything has been so… so strange, lately.”

“We know,” Martin said. “It’s alright.” 

“Still.” Sasha ran a hand through her hair. “I’d like to have you over for drinks tonight, if that works. Make up for things.”

Martin began to refuse on the grounds that he didn’t drink-- his mother had, which was why he didn’t-- but Tim stomped on his foot under the table.

“That’ll work, right, Martin?” Tim asked through his teeth. 

“Right, sure. Yeah.”

Martin knocked on the door of Sasha’s flat at precisely eight pm. Tim opened the door, which was a surprise, since Martin had never seen him be early to anything.

“Hey, Martin,” Sasha said from over Tim’s shoulder. “Come on in.”

Sasha’s flat was small but cozy. It smelled like tea and ink. It was in stark contrast to Martin’s, which was sterile and cold in comparison.

There was only one thing that didn’t fit with the homey atmosphere of Sasha’s home. Every picture frame Martin could see had been laid face down. 

“All right,” Sasha said, setting a bottle of wine on the table. “I thought we could try a sort of visualization exercise, the kind of thing where we close our eyes and meditate. Workplace stress and all that.”

Martin’s eyebrows shot towards his hairline. 

Tim stomped on his foot again. 

“Right. Whatever you say,” Martin said hurriedly. He closed his eyes.

“Everyone’s eyes closed?” Sasha asked.

“Yep,” Tim said. Even with his eyes closed, Martin could tell Tim was bouncing his leg again. The couch was shaking underneath him.

Martin said, “Yes, but, um, Sasha--?”

“I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about ways we could have this conversation,” Sasha said. “This is the best I could come up with. Would anyone like a glass of wine before we begin? Oh, and keep your eyes closed if you value your life.” 

Sasha told them the story of Gertrude’s tapes and laid out her meticulously researched theories about the types of fear entities. Martin was glad no one could see his expression when she began to discuss Jonathan’s involvement in the whole thing.

Martin was still staring at his clock and trying to relax at two in the morning. He couldn’t decide if he was praying Jonathan stayed away or appeared in his window again.

“You really should sleep,” Jonathan informed him at two thirty-seven. 

Martin took a second to make sure his heart hadn’t pounded out of his chest before responding. “I thought it was your job to drive people insane. Shouldn’t you be happy that I’m not sleeping?”

Martin didn’t even have time to blink before Jonathan was looming over him, his eyes dark-bright and angry.

“Who told you that?”

He wasn’t sure how much he could say, considering that Elias could apparently _see through everyone’s eyes--_

Right. Not thinking about it. Besides, if Elias was watching right now, he already knew about Jonathan, and there was nothing Martin could do about that.

“Sasha told us. About the fear entities. You seem to show up an awful lot in the statements where people think they’re losing their mind.”

“After all of Gertrude’s secrecy, the Archivist simply _told you._ ” Jonathan shook his head in what appeared to be profound disappointment and retreated to perch on Martin’s windowsill once more.

Martin should have been terrified.

The sound of Jon’s soft, staticky breathing lulled him to sleep within minutes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Stay safe and have a good week!


	8. Martin//Sasha

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note on the Leitner which makes an appearance in this chapter: as the Archivist and someone who’s more aware of the fears, I’m gonna say Sasha has some resistance to compulsions.  
> Content warning for a giant spider (briefly) because I personally fucking hate spiders and figured I’d warn y’all  
> A thousand thank yous to yumantimatter for helping me figure this chapter-- and fic, for that matter. Without her help this fic would not exist, let alone be even remotely cohesive.  
> As always, thank you so much for reading, I hope you like it, and I love hearing from you :)

Sasha put Martin in charge of compiling statements on Jonathan. She said she was focusing on the entity because he was an obvious and confirmed link, but Martin had to wonder. 

(He wouldn’t have wondered but for the cool calculation he glimpsed when she gave him his assignment. In that moment Martin was glad he hadn’t told her, Tim, or anyone else about Jon’s new habit of visiting when Martin couldn’t sleep. He didn’t want to know for sure what Sasha would do with that information.)

 _Too damned curious_ , Martin remembered Sasha saying, and he bit his lip hard enough to bleed. 

He opened the next file on his list only to see the words twisting on the page.

“Why are you here, Jonathan?” Martin asked. It was three nights after Sasha gave him his assignment. His crossword lay half-finished beside a cold cup of tea on the cheap table in front of him. 

Across the table, the entity with the knives for hands twisted in his chair as if to crack his back. His torso curled around the back of the chair, snake-like, and he stared at Martin. Martin dropped his gaze to the gently steaming surface of his tea.

“Why, I’m driving you insane, of course,” Jonathan said.

“Not a very good way to go about it, helping me sleep and warming up my tea.”

“On the contrary. It’s very effective.”

Martin neatly folded his crossword book open and picked up his pencil again. 

They sat in silence for what Martin thought was about an hour. It was hard to tell, considering-- well, considering _Jonathan_ \-- but it was a comfortable probably-hour. 

Martin gave up on his crossword when the grids turned into a spiral.

“Okay, fine. I’ll ask. How are you driving me insane?”

“You can’t honestly expect me to answer.”

“Well, it was worth a try.”

When Jonathan laughed, Martin laughed, just a little, along with him. 

If Martin’s laughter echoed, just a little, he didn’t notice.

//

Sasha was not one to question her actions once she’d made a choice, so when she couldn’t sleep the night Martin finished his research, it wasn’t because she was having second thoughts. It was because she didn’t know where to go next.

She had elected to proceed on the assumption that the tape Jonathan had given her was real. Gertrude’s voice had been just like Sasha remembered it, sharp and brisk with just a hint of impatience already in it, and the information on the tape had made sense.

And she’d been unable to quit. She’d tried. She’d written her resignation letter and hadn’t been able to force her hand to complete her signature. 

If she was wrong, if the entity with the knife hands was toying with her like he did with the rest of his poor victims… 

Well. 

Then he was winning, and there was no point in questioning it now. 

It was around two thirty in the morning when Sasha decided on her plan. She knew there was a list of the artifacts her predecessor had gathered somewhere-- she only really remembered that Tim had been disappointed to learn it was mostly books and not written in code, but she remembered it existed. 

Sasha would find it and go from there. 

Exhausted, she finally fell asleep. 

Martin was whistling again. Sasha resisted the urge to glare at him. She was prone to headaches if she didn’t sleep enough and even coffee couldn’t quell the one brewing behind her eyes. 

“Good night’s sleep again?” Tim asked Martin. His tone was too innocent to actually be innocent. 

Martin flushed. “Yes, actually.”

“Uh-huh. You sure smell like you’ve got reason to be… worn out.”

“Leave him alone, Tim,” Sasha said tiredly. If Martin had found someone who let him sleep, she was happy for him. Even if he did smell like cigarettes beneath the smell of tea.

Tim might have been that person for her, once. Before the promotion, before he got drunk one too many times. Before. 

“What? I’m just--”

“Leave it,” she repeated. 

She slammed her office door behind her and winced as it jarred her headache.

She apologized at lunch. Tim just shrugged and stole a bite of her sandwich, which Sasha interpreted to mean that she was forgiven. 

Martin was the one who found the list of Gertrude’s artifacts. It turned out to be in a folder Tim had wedged into his desk. 

“Why would you put it there?” Sasha asked as she pulled the thin sheath of papers from the folder. “I’m legitimately curious.”

“Um.” Tim flashed his seduce-the-secretary-for-information smile, but there was an uncertain edge to it. “I think I thought maybe there was something interesting in it? I don’t actually remember moving it...”

Sasha snorted and retreated to her office. 

As it turned out, there were several interesting things on the list, although it took Sasha more effort than she would have liked to read Gertrude’s cramped and spidery handwriting. 

Most of the artifacts her predecessor had gathered were books, like Tim had said. For the majority of them, the _Current Location_ column had _Artifact Storage_ written in it. Five of the books were starred; three of those were crossed out.

Sasha nodded decisively and stood up. 

She didn’t like Artifact Storage. Hated it, in fact. But this was a possible next step, and she desperately needed one.

The Artifact Storage workers didn’t ask any questions. Sasha had expected as much. She hadn’t asked many questions when she’d worked there, either. 

She found one of the books which Gertrude had starred but not crossed out easily enough. The title, _A Guest for Mr. Spider,_ matched the cover. Child-like but creepy.

Although the nameplate made Sasha wary-- hadn’t she heard the name Leitner before?-- she turned to the first page and began to read despite the creeping sense she shouldn’t. Some strange force seemed to force Sasha’s fingertips to the pages and once she began to read, she forgot why she had ever been reluctant to do so. 

It was a book, after all. What harm could it do?

She looked up from the last page with the words _it is polite to knock_ ringing in her head and found herself staring at a black, red-stained door which was creaking open.

Sasha wanted to stay. She wanted to be Mr. Spider’s guest. She wanted to be polite.

A long, black limb covered in bristling hair reached around the door. 

Something snagged her shirt and yanked her backwards. Sasha fell hard. 

For a moment, she thought she’d hit her head, because her vision was swimming. Then she realized it was the floor that was moving. 

Her mind cleared enough for another wave of adrenaline to surge through her. 

“Oh, no.”

“I presumed you wanted a door,” Jonathan said, bored. He was inspecting the razor-sharp tips of his long, curving fingernails. “If I was wrong, you’re welcome to go back the same way you came in. And get eaten. Your choice.”

Sasha flicked a frantic glance over her shoulder. It had shut behind her, but the yellow door with the matte-black doorknob was still there. “You’d let me leave?”

Jonathan smiled. “Of course. Right back to where you came from.”

“And if I don’t… where are you going to let me out?”

His bright smile widened another few inches. “Wherever I wish, of course. And here Martin said you were smart.”

He smelled like cigarettes. 

It hit her.

_Oh, Martin. What have you gotten yourself into?_

Sasha pushed it aside for now and nodded. She didn’t have a choice. “Fine.”

“Some gratitude would not be amiss, Archivist.”

Jonathan strode further into his swirling hallways without a backwards glance. Sasha hurried after him. Knife hands or not, she’d take the devil she knew. Especially when the devil she didn’t know was--

Well. She didn’t much care for spiders.

The hallways were more or less how Helen Richardson had described them-- in a word, impossible. Sasha did her best not to look at anything too closely.

“It was incredibly stupid to read that,” Jonathan threw over his jagged, wavering shoulder. 

“I, uh,” Sasha panted, “I see that now.”

“Leitners.” Jonathan sighed. It was a broken, hissing sound. “If I cared about your welfare, I’d tell you to avoid them.”

“Why did you give me a door, if you don’t care about my welfare?” 

“Because I don’t like the Mother of Puppets.”

“What--”

“Here you are,” Jonathan said, opening his door. Sasha blinked. “Out.”

She took a deep breath. “Thank you, I suppose.”

He brushed past her and started away from the door again. “Don’t thank me. You’re not out of the woods yet.”

Jonathan’s echoing, staticky laugh followed her out the door. 

_Shit,_ Sasha thought, biting her knuckles hard to keep herself from breathing too loudly. _Shit, shit, shit. Too damned curious. Too goddamned curious._

“Oh, Sasha,” Mr. Spider called, sing-song. His-- its? Pronouns were so hard with inhuman entities, but this was hardly the time to worry about it-- voice dropped as he came closer. “Come out, come out, wherever you are. It’s not polite to hide, you know.”

Sasha’s chest twinged with artificial sadness at the thought of being impolite. She shook it off. _Well, fuck that._

“If you come out,” Mr. Spider said, his voice low and cold now, “I’ll kill you before I eat you. Ask Jon.”

The name _Jon_ echoed both louder and longer than it should have. 

“Jon?” Sasha asked, and immediately cursed herself for a fool, but he sounded far enough away, but-- _shit, shit,_ fuck-- “You mean Jonathan?”

“Ah, there you are,” Mr. Spider said from above her.

Sasha looked up and saw his large, bulbous eyes reflecting her pale face back at her. His open mouth dripped liquid which steamed as it fell. One drop burned into her cheek.

She screamed in pain and fear.

The hall shifted, spinning and dropping quickly enough she felt sick, and suddenly she was alone-- or, rather, there was no more spider. Instead, there was a figure approaching. 

Sasha took a moment to collect herself. She took a deep breath, even though every cell of her body was in full-blown fight or flight mode. It would do her no good to be unable to think. Her mind was the only weapon she had-- besides the pipe she’d found and could barely lift, anyway. 

Next time she went to Artifact Storage, Sasha swore to herself, she was _bringing her fucking taser_.

“Ms. James?” the stranger asked. He looked old and relatively harmless. She kept her hand clenched around the pipe.

“Yes.” Speaking pulled at the wound on her cheek. It burned. It would certainly scar. Absently, Sasha wondered if it would replace the cluster of scars that the worms had left there. It was a good thing she wasn’t vain.

The stranger smiled at her gently. “I think it’s time we had a talk.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Stay safe and have a good week!


	9. Sasha

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sasha doesn't much care for Jurgen Leitner.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, I have a research paper due this week. Yes, I wrote this instead.  
> Content warning for a panic attack.  
> Hope you’re doing well and that you enjoy this chapter!

The recorder clicked on. Sasha didn’t even bother to wonder when it had found its way onto her desk.

“Please,” the stranger said, glancing around Sasha’s office. “I don’t know how much time we have.”

“So you said.” Sasha pointedly placed the pipe on her desk beside the tape recorder. If her arms were burning with the strain of carrying it, she had no intention of showing it. 

“Is that necessary? You think I pose a threat to you?”

“Yes. Yes, I do.”

Sasha reached into her desk drawer and pulled out her taser. Immediately, she felt better. More in control. 

The old man laughed. The sound was strained. “Really, a taser?... I suppose Gertrude would have approved.”

“She was the one who advised me to get one,” Sasha said. It had been good advice. 

The man nodded. “That certainly sounds like her. Look, take it with you if you want, but I can’t afford to just sit here.”

“So talk fast.” Sasha had no intention of leaving behind the safety of locked doors.

“Could we at least have this conversation in the tunnels?”

“I’m not going back down there. That-- that _thing_ , Mr. Spider, is-- is it dead?”

“Unlikely. Whether something like that can actually be destroyed… It is trapped. I, I hope for a very long time.”

Sasha hoped so as well. She cleared her throat and did her job. 

“You aren’t what I expected.”

“Neither,” the man said, “are you. I hadn’t expected that Gertrude’s successor would be anything more than a mere shadow of her, but you are doing rather well in living up to her legacy.”

Sasha was rather flattered by that, but she kept her face blank. “I’m not the one being interrogated here. I thought you’d be more… Norwegian.”

“My family emigrated when I was very young. English was always my first language. I used to adopt an accent sometimes when meeting people, a sort of personal joke, but truth be told, my Norwegian is terrible. Now, are you going to help me or not?”

“You first. You want my help, you answer my questions. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

“Good.” Sasha took a deep breath, still reeling from the day’s events and the presence of the man before her. She wasn’t even sure what questions she wanted to ask him, this man who had dared to lay claim to _A Guest for Mr. Spider_ and so many others. 

Sasha wasn’t sure what she was going to do, but she did know that she was going to do her job. 

“Statement of Jurgen Leitner. February 16th, 2017. Statement begins.”

“You’re quite like her, you know,” Leitner said. “I suppose that’s no surprise, and I did already tell you that, more or less. Women with spines of steel and the eyes of a Fury, the both of you.”

Sasha stared at him. His face flushed and he took a sudden interest in the tape recorder. Sasha, her lips twitching, wondered if perhaps Jurgen Leitner had had a crush on her predecessor.

Leitner cleared his throat. “Anyway, your questions?”

“Right.” Sasha was supposed to have questions. “Let’s start with what you did down there. How you... trapped it.”

Leitner pulled a small book from the inside pocket of his coat. He placed it on the desk and the scent of damp earth rose from it. It was followed by a second, even slimmer volume.

“An unexpurgated copy of Ruskin’s _The Seven Lamps of Architecture,_ published in 1845. Of course, Ruskin didn’t even begin writing the book until 1846, and the text of this one varies markedly from the version that was distributed. It gives an acute sense of the walls pressing in around you, and if consumed recklessly, will physically entomb the reader.”

The Buried, then. Sasha wished she was free to take notes. The recording would have to do. 

“Over the years, I have found that it interacts with Smirke’s architecture, and those tunnels specifically, in a more predictable way. By carefully reading specific passages in certain locations, I am able to exercise… a degree of control over the substance of the tunnels.” Leitner shrugged. 

_The years?_

Sasha put that one aside for later. 

“I didn’t hear you say anything down there.”

“I said reading. It doesn’t need to be spoken aloud.”

_Right. Get it together, James._

Out loud, she asked, “So you can change the tunnels?”

“More or less.” Leitner hesitated. “I was expecting you to explore them, you know. After the incident with Prentiss.”

“I had better things to do with my time.”

He looked affronted, but said nothing. Sasha gingerly inspected the second book Leitner had placed on her desk. The title read _A Disappearance_. 

“And this one?”

“If read cover to cover, it removes one from the world. I cannot say precisely what that means, only that the assistant I assigned to it, Jacob Feng, was never seen again.”

The sudden surge of dislike which Sasha experienced took her by surprise. 

If she ever spoke so casually of sacrificing her assistants-- her _friends_ \-- then she would have become one of the monsters.

Leitner seemed to sense her dislike, because he did not meet her eyes as he continued his explanation. “I have found, however, that reading only one or two words is sufficient to hide me from the prying eyes of your master. It allowed me to talk with Gertrude in relative safety, and occasionally come above ground for my own ends.”

“By my master, you mean Elias?”

Leitner looked stunned. “Yes. How--”

“Gertrude told me.”

He looked, if possible, more startled. 

“We’ll get to that,” Sasha said, with no intention of actually getting to that. “How long have you been down there?”

“Hard to say.” 

Leitner bemoaned the loss of his library and sense of security at great length. The only thing which interested Sasha was his account of “an angry goth”.

 _Well done, Gerard,_ she thought privately. 

“So are you to blame?” Sasha asked when Leitner had finished talking. 

He had the nerve to ask, “For what?”

The hand which wasn’t holding her taser curled into a fist beneath her desk. “For the books. Or did you just stick your name on them by accident? Why the ‘Library of Jurgen Leitner’?”

He spoke of hubris; he spoke of intentions. Sasha didn’t give a damn. But she still had to know.

**“Tell me from the beginning.”**

He did. 

When he was finished, Sasha said, “You were right.”

“About what?”

“You were a fool.”

“Hmm,” Leitner responded. As if it was debatable.

_Should’ve finished the job, Gerard._

“Why didn’t you burn them?”

“Pride. If they were destroyed, what was I to guard? Even so, I don’t believe that would have solved as many problems as you think. Many of them wouldn’t have burned, and some even liked the flames. And those that did, I now believe, would have been released to take a different form.”

“The fire,” Sasha said, “ _really_ isn’t the point here. Regardless. How did you know Gertrude?”

“I didn’t meet her until about six years ago, after she’d lost the last of her own assistants. She would mention them sometimes. I believe she missed having someone to talk to on occasion.”

Sasha almost laughed. Gertrude would never have allowed herself to be vulnerable enough to miss something. 

“So, when she found me, it seemed natural that we help each other. In this instance, that meant finding certain useful books.”

“Like _A Guest for Mr. Spider_?”

Leitner nodded. “A nasty little thing, that one. One of the ones that wouldn’t burn. We rather expected that, considering the power that it’s affiliated with. It came to us through Gertrude’s last assistant, whatever Hell he might be trapped in now.”

Sasha didn’t have time to wonder about the fate of whatever poor bastard had brought in the book. “By power, I suppose you mean the one that’s all about spiders?”

It was a genuine pleasure to see Leitner’s mouth fall open in shock. 

“How do you know about the Web?”

“Oh, that’s what it’s called? I’ve been calling it “the spider one”. And I know about these so-called powers because Gertrude told me about them.”

Sasha was not above admitting she could be petty. And when speaking to a man responsible for so much pain, she hardly cared if she was being vindictive. 

Leitner nodded slowly. “So Elias didn’t find the tape. I shouldn’t have doubted her. Where did she hide it?”

“First, you tell me how you knew about it.”

“She told me,” he said simply.

Sasha blinked, absorbing that information. “I’m not entirely certain where she hid it, but Jonathan gave it to me.”

“Jonathan?” Leitner looked puzzled. “Ah. Gertrude’s last assistant, yes? I suppose he survived leaving after all.”

Sasha went very still. 

Leitner didn’t seem to notice. “Yes. _A Guest for Mr. Spider_ is one of the Web’s. There are fourteen fears in all-- or fifteen, if you believe Adelard Decker.” He sniffed. “The books are, I think, their essences in a purer form. The other things that stalk us, from what I know of them, they have varying wills of their own. All in service of the thing they’re a part of, but not directly controlled by the mind beneath them. At least, inasmuch as these entities have something we could recognise as a mind.”

Sasha thought of what Jonathan-- oh Christ Jesus, _Jonathan_ \-- had said during their first meeting. “Like a… a, a, muscle, spasming on reflex?”

Leitner hummed. “Yes, that’s actually rather good.”

She swallowed and took the leap. “It would explain Jonathan’s identity issues.”

“Jonathan? Oh… that, that’s what the Distortion calls itself these days, isn’t it?”

He didn’t seem to make the connection. Sasha hoped that meant her theory was wrong. Jonathan was a rather common name, after all. 

Surely, _surely_ , it was a coincidence.

Leitner continued, “That one is part of a power that my assistant Michael used to call “Esmentiaras”, which I believe translates as ‘it is lies’ or ‘it is lying’. At the time, of course, we just used it as a way to classify books. I call it the Spiral. It deals in fooling the senses, in making you see and hear things that are not there, in drawing you into mazes and making you doubt your own sanity.”

“Fractals,” Sasha said, remembering some of the statements of mathematicians Martin had shown her. She didn’t mention cigarette smoke.

“Yes. It seems to have a particular fondness for those.”

She asked about bones; he spoke to her in a way that reminded her a bit too much of all the men in her discussion groups who told her her stories would be better with less feminism. 

For no apparent reason-- well, no new reason, anyway-- Sasha felt her chest begin to tighten. The familiar feverish feeling washed over her.

 _Shit_. 

Sasha put her head between her knees despite knowing it was hopeless. She hadn’t had a panic attack in _months_ , why did it have to be _now_ \--

“We don’t have time for you to have a breakdown, Archivist.”

Every cell in Sasha’s body was screaming _trapped, get out, can’t breathe, get out,_ ** _can’t breathe_** **_can’t breathecan’tbreathecan’tBREATHE--_**

She almost bolted for the open air her lungs and mind craved so desperately. But the thought of it felt a little too natural, a little too much like opening _A Guest for Mr. Spider_ had, so she didn’t.

“Fuck you,” she spat at Leitner between shallow breaths. “I’m having a goddamn breakdown.”

“Oh. Are you…” Leitner’s hand hovered awkwardly above her shoulder.

“Touch me and I swear to God I will tase you," Sasha managed to gasp out.

“Right.” He sat down again. She tried to breathe. 

The door opened just as Sasha’s fingers were beginning to tingle from the come-down of adrenaline. She kept her head firmly between her knees. Whoever it was wouldn’t see her like this, but that was the least of Sasha’s worries at the moment.

“Well. This _is_ a surprise,” Elias said. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Stay safe and have a good week!


	10. Sasha

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sasha conducts some unorthodox meetings.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's one am so it's technically Monday. If you're awake right now you should be asleep.  
> Thank you so much for all of your comments!

Sasha froze. Leitner shoved his chair backwards, lurching to his feet.

“Reach for a book and I _will_ kill you,” Elias said conversationally. Leitner sat back down. 

Sasha didn’t dare move. She thought she was out of Elias’ sight, bent beneath her desk as she was, but…

“How much have you told her?”

“Enough,” Leitner said. Sasha bit her lip to avoid hysterical giggles. No one had told her _enough_. 

“About Gertrude?”

“I think Sasha already suspects you killed her,” Leitner said. “So no.” 

Sasha bit down harder as the hysteria bubbled up. Her back was beginning to ache from her awkward hunched-over position. Either Elias hadn’t noticed her-- unlikely, but she could hope-- or he was ignoring her for some reason.

“I’ve wondered for _so_ long who it could be down there. Who was helping her. I honestly never would have guessed.”

“How did you know I was here?” Leitner asked. 

“I didn’t. You’re very well hidden. But Sasha is not, and she failed to take the same precautions I’m sure you took for granted with Gertrude. I knew she was talking to someone. And it turns out to be Jurgen Leitner himself.” Elias chuckled softly. The hair on the back of Sasha’s neck stood on end. “What an honor.”

When Leitner spoke next, he was begging. “Elias, _please_.”

“What did you want from her?” Elias asked. His tone was possessive enough to make Sasha’s skin crawl. 

“The files,” Leitner said. “The ones you took from Gertrude.”

“Planning a little light arson, are we, Jurgen?”

“It’s not just the Institute, and you know it. They had everything she found on the Stranger.”

The Stranger. Sasha skimmed through her mental notes on the fear gods and came up with nothing specific. 

“I know,” Elias said. His tone said _I know everything_. Sasha’s hands were clenched tightly into fists. “It’s, um… what do they call it?”

“The Unknowing.”

Sasha couldn’t recall anything about an unknowing, either. If she survived this-- an outcome which was looking less and less likely by the minute-- she’d have to put Tim or Martin on it.

Elias chuckled again. It was just as disconcerting the second time around. “Creativity never was their forte.”

“You of _all_ people should want to stop them.”

“And we will. But I don’t think we’ll need your help.”

“And what’s she going to think when she gets back?” Leitner asked. 

He was covering for her. Sasha wasn’t sure what to think of that. 

“Well, she was always going to need to fly the nest at some point. Go out and see the world for herself.”

“She might die.”

_That isn’t exactly news._

“It’s always a danger,” Elias said. “Almost always.”

He stepped forward, his hand reaching for the pipe on Sasha’s desk. Then he went perfectly still.

“Hello, Sasha,” Elias said. “And what exactly are you doing?”

Sasha raised her head slowly. _You killed Gertrude,_ she wanted to scream. Instead, she fixed a careless smile on her face. “I _was_ having a panic attack, but you two seemed to have a lot to catch up on, so I just…” she trailed off, shrugging. 

Leitner was inching towards the door. She let him, keeping her eyes fixed on the center of Elias’ forehead. 

“Yes. How very polite of you not to make your presence known,” Elias muttered. Then, louder, “Goodbye, Jurgen.”

Leitner lurched through the door. It squeaked as it closed behind him. 

A horrible suspicion arose in Sasha’s thoughts as Elias smiled at her. He was speaking before she could make up her mind as to whether Jonathan had just taken Leitner. 

“Would you care to come up to my office for a discussion?” he asked. 

_Not really_.

“I have it on good authority that no spiders have ever entered,” Gertrude’s killer added.

“Very well,” Sasha said, standing on shaking legs. 

Elias shrugged out of his suit jacket and offered it to her. Sasha stared at him, forgetting to avoid eye contact in her confusion.

“The back of your, ah, blouse appears to be in shreds,” Elias explained, his eyes politely averted, the proffered jacket still extended towards her. “As well as much of the front of it. I thought perhaps…”

Sasha remembered that she shouldn’t reveal her distaste if she wanted to live. “Ah. Thank you.”

She slipped the murderer’s jacket on. To her disgust, it was a very comfortable jacket. Her shivering stopped.

Sasha would have to remember to tell Jonathan to watch the knife hands the next time he saved her life. She would really rather not have to explain to Rosie-- or anyone else-- why she was wearing her boss’s jacket over a tattered shirt. 

Elias held her office door open for her, as well his as his own. Sasha thanked him and kept her gaze fixed on the floor.

“So,” Elias said, settling into his chair with the grace of a large cat. “What did Jurgen tell you?”

“Not much, honestly,” Sasha said. She kept her eyes fixed on the bridge of his nose as Elias’ pale eyes tried to bore into hers. “Just about his hubris and foolish mistakes. A little about his books.”

“Anything about me?”

“No. Well, besides some rambling about you being my “master”, which…” Sasha shrugged. The too-long sleeves of Elias’ suit jacket flopped against her hands as she did so. “Little creepy, to be honest.”

Elias gave that low, eerie laugh again. 

“The ramblings of a deluded mind,” he said. “He thinks I killed Gertrude, as I’m sure you heard.”

Sasha nodded, studiously avoiding eye contact. “Yes.”

“And what do you think?”

“I think that was more ramblings from a deluded mind,” Sasha said. 

Elias smiled, thin and sharp. “Yes. So do I. Nothing which the police would take seriously.” 

Sasha couldn’t help swallowing. 

“I am so glad we understand each other,” Elias said. “Shall I call you a taxi?”

“That would be nice, thank you.”

“Excellent.” He reached for his desk phone. “I’ll expect you at the usual time tomorrow morning, shall I?”

The taxi driver took Sasha’s disheveled state in with a glance, shrugged, and asked for her address. The lack of scrutiny was glorious.

While she was fumbling for her keys in front of her door, Tim opened it from the inside.

“Tim? What are you doing in my flat?”

“I was waiting for you,” he said, eyeing her. “I got worried. It’s Thursday?”

_Oh_. Thursday was the day they went and saw a movie. It was a weekly tradition. She’d even bought tickets in advance and shown them to him at lunch.

“Shit. Sorry.”

“S’alright, looks like you had fun,” he said, and there was a glimmer of hurt in his eyes that his bright smile couldn’t quite disguise. “What’s his name? Or hers, I suppose.”

Sasha couldn’t resist. “Elias. You know, our boss? His clothes are really quite comfortable.”

Tim’s mouth fell open. Sasha laughed a little hysterically and stepped inside her flat, closing the door behind the two of them.

She had a lot of explaining to do; she had a lot more work ahead of her. But somehow, with Tim here, it no longer seemed insurmountable.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Stay safe and have a good week!


	11. Personal Update (Will Delete Later)

Hi everyone,

My mental health is not the best right now so I'm afraid it might be another week or two before I manage to write the next chapter. Sorry for the delay.

Take care of yourselves. :)

-Jay (-notyouranswer)


	12. Chapter Eleven: Sasha//Tim

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey everyone, I'm back!  
> I know it's not Monday, but I wanted to update.  
> I can't express how much all of your comments meant to me. Thank you so much.  
> Chapters may continue to be sporadic, but I'm doing better, so. :)

Sasha started with the archive files. She was filled with trepidation the whole time, of course, but she was able to find the records of two employees who were named Jonathan. Both were presumed dead; there was a body in only one instance. Jonathan Sims had simply disappeared one day, as employees of the Magnus Institute were prone to doing. She took his file and hurried back to the dubious safety of her office. 

There was a picture clipped to the inside of the manila folder. Sasha studied it and swallowed. 

There was no doubt that this is the right file. Even five years ago, Jonathan's eyes had glinted with the same slightly broken light. It was brighter now, but something in her had to wonder if Jonathan had always been destined to become the corridors of the Distortion.

Sasha began to read. 

Jonathan Sims' performance reviews were all glowing. Seeing Gertrude praise someone so openly made Sasha slightly jealous, but her envy was easily counterbalanced by the knowledge of the fate that had awaited Jonathan. 

The file ended with an expense report for a one-way trip to an unspecified location. The method of transportation bullet point said only "The Tundra". Sasha made a note of the name, slipped the picture of Jonathan into her pocket, and closed the file.

She opened her laptop and set to work searching for the Spiral’s social media accounts. 

“My life is truly bizarre,” Sasha informed Tim over drinks that night. “Like. Really just, just incredibly strange.”

“Is this news?”

She smacked his arm and took a long drink of beer. They drank in companionable silence for a few minutes, exchanging dry looks whenever the people surrounding them were particularly obnoxious.

“All right, I’ll bite. Why was it exceptionally strange today?”

“I discovered that the embodiment of the fear of insanity has an Instagram account.”

Tim knocked over his glass.

“And,” Sasha continued, enjoying herself immensely as Tim scrambled to clean the table off, “It’s just pictures of a cat. Big orange fluffy one. That’s all it is. He has ten thousand followers.”

Tim stared into the remnants of his martini blankly. “It’s not called “theadmiral”, no spaces, is it?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“I’m pretty sure I follow the embodiment of the fear of insanity on Instagram. Well. That explains the weird glitches.”

Sasha set her glass down slowly. “You--”

“Anyway,” Tim interrupted, “Did you find anything else?”

She waited until his glass was at his lips to say, “He was the lead singer in an emo band.”

Tim did a spit take. 

Delicately dabbing liquid off her dress, Sasha elaborated. “Eyeliner, leather, the whole works. One of the guitar players tagged the cat account in a post a few years ago.”

Tim stared at her. 

“Fishnets,” she added helpfully. “Hair gel.” Sasha demonstrated the remarkably spiky style she’d seen on Jonathan with her hands.

Tim groaned and buried his face in his hands. “I haven’t even met the guy and I hate that image more than I can express.”

Sasha cackled and signalled for another round. 

“Think Martin knows?” Tim asked once the waiter was gone.

“What, that his boyfriend is the Spiral?” She’d told Tim about who Martin was actually dating the day before. She blamed the shock for it. 

“That his boyfriend was in an emo band.”

“I feel like we have a duty to tell him.”

“Well, obviously,” Tim said.

It took her another two rounds to remember her most important discovery.

“He tags the same account in all his posts.”

“How does he use a phone with knife hands?”

Sasha contemplated the question. She was pretty sure she was drunk, so she thought about that, too.

“Sasha?”

“Right. No idea. But the account is someone called Georgie Barker. I thought we could track her down.”

“Right.” Tim nodded seriously. The effect was somewhat ruined when he reached for his glass and missed it completely. “Like Jason Bourne.”

“Have you not a patriotic bone in your body?”

“Like James Bond.”

“There we go.” Sasha thought about another round but decided it was against her best interests. 

“Jason Bourne is better, though.”

Sasha changed her mind. “I need more booze for this debate,” she announced.

“As long as you’re buying.”

//

Tim promised Sasha he would call a cab, but once she was out of sight, he started walking for home. It was only ten minutes or so, anyway, and it would help him sober up. He liked being drunk-- to what was probably a problematic extent, if he was honest-- but he hated being out of control. It was a tough balancing act, but he’d grown very accustomed to walking that thin line since Danny--

Since Danny. 

Tim tucked his chin into his jacket and sped up. 

He was nearly home when he passed an alley and a raspy voice asked, “Got a cigarette?”

Tim glanced to his right and decided he was far more drunk than he’d thought he was, because the person asking him for a cigarette appeared to be hovering.

“Nope,” he said. “Sorry. Don’t smoke.”

The person moved forward a little. “Got a cigarette?”

“No,” Tim repeated, irritated. “Piss off.”

The silhouette paused, then approached more rapidly. “Got a cigarette?”

Tim, fervently regretting his decision to walk, clenched his hands into fists, scrambling for the memories of what he’d learned from his brother during Danny’s Krav Maga phase. All he really remembered was that there had been a lot of kneeing people in the groin. And eye gouging. A lot of that, too. 

The dim light of the streetlight fell across the face of Tim’s strange conversational partner. 

Tim’s mouth went dry.

“Danny?”

“Got a cigarette, Tim?” 

A sob tore out of Tim’s throat.

“That’s not your brother,” a bored voice said from across the street. In the midnight silence, the speaker didn't even have to raise their voice. Tim, barely able to tear his eyes away from the mutilated ruins of his brother’s face, glanced behind himself to see a shadow with sickeningly long, curving fingers. “I’d advise coming over here. Martin would be terribly upset if it... took you.”

“Got a cigarette, Tim?”

Tim, tears streaking down his face, turned and ran for the yellow door.

When he was three feet away, he tripped and fell on the curb.

Jonathan-- who else could it be?-- sighed. It was an echoing, static-filled sound. “I’m not picking you up. You’re not nearly as useful as the Archivist. Go ahead and die if you want to. I imagine you must want to, come to think of it...”

“Fuck you,” Tim snarled. He got to his feet and lurched through the Spiral’s door. 

“That’s the spirit.”

The door closed behind them just before the thing which had once been Danny Stoker reached it.


	13. Chapter Twelve: Tim//Sasha

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Martin and Jon are strangely romantic. Tim is hungover. Sasha is on a mission.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's not quite Monday, but here ya go.  
> The first scene goes out to the person who commented that the hell hallways would be a terrible place to be drunk.  
> As always, I can't express how much I treasure every single one of your kudos and comments. Thank you to everyone who's reading this.

“Is he dead?” Tim asked. “Danny. Is he dead?”

“Is Jonathan Sims dead?” The entity let the question hand in the air for a moment before answering. “In every way that matters, yes.”

“But you still post pictures of the Admiral.”

Jonathan went very still.

“So,” Tim hurriedly added, uncomfortable with Jonathan’s nebula-filled eyes so coolly intent upon him, “you still care, right? There’s something left of who you used to be?”

“The Stranger,” Jonathan said, “is not the Spiral.”

“But you’re both the fear of the unnatural.”

Jonathan laughed; Tim cringed. 

“Oh, very good, Timothy. Yes, I imagine your brother screamed and begged for death very much like Jonathan did.”

Tim threw up. 

Over his own retching, he heard Jonathan’s disgusted “Really?”, and almost laughed. 

Wiping his mouth with the back of his arm, Tim said, “Vomit can only add to the color scheme you’ve got going on with your man-eating hallways, here. This is a really shitty place to be while drunk.”

“I should have let you get eaten.”

Tim swallowed down more bile. “So how do I kill what my brother was turned into?”

“How do you kill a lie?”

“Tell the truth.”

Jonathan nodded. “That’s all you need to release whatever’s left of your brother. Now, for the real reason I saved you.”

Tim held his breath. His head spun.

“What’s an appropriate one-month anniversary gift?”

Tim burst out laughing. He couldn’t help it. Jonathan’s eyes flared bright white in warning, but Tim kept laughing. 

“You… you saved my life so you could ask for relationship advice?”

“Yes.”

The affronted look on Jonathan’s face sent Tim into hysterics again.

“How the fuck,” Tim gasped, “is this my life?”

“Are roses acceptable?” Jonathan asked, brandishing a bouquet of roses. The arrangement of their petals hurt Tim’s brain. “I’m rather fond of daisies, myself, but roses are what they had.”

“Er…” Tim hiccuped. “Yes, actually. Flowers are good.”

“Great.” The yellow door on Tim’s right had either just appeared or had always been there. “Now get out before you throw up on my carpet again.”

Tim stumbled through the door before Jonathan could change his mind.

The door creaked shut behind him and disappeared. Tim headed straight for his liquor cabinet. 

The gin earned him a few hours of sleep. When he woke up at three that morning, he lit a cigarette for the first time in years and ignored the drying tears on his face as he smoked it.

“Happy birthday, Danny,” Tim whispered, lighting his second cigarette. “I promise I’ll kill you.”

“What’s a good one-month anniversary gift?” Martin asked Tim on Monday morning, hovering anxiously with two mugs of tea clutched in his hands.

Tim groaned, hungover and sick to his stomach due to both futile anger and said hangover. He said, “Jonathan mentioned that he likes daisies.”

Martin walked away humming while Tim wished for a new identity. He was not qualified for any of this. Martin and Jonathan, his brother, this Georgie Barker person-- none of it.

_How do you kill a lie?_

_Tell the truth._

The fuck did that mean? 

Martin’s tea helped Tim feel a little more human. When Sasha asked him to accompany her on an errand, her face intent enough to convey her true meaning, Tim gulped down the last of his tea and stood up. 

Maybe Georgie Barker would know how to kill a lie. 

//

Tim was being uncharacteristically quiet, and it looked like he hadn’t shaved in days. Sasha did her best to resist the urge to throw him concerned looks on the cab ride to Georgina Barker’s house.

She was unsuccessful. 

“What?” Tim snapped.

“You’re being weird,” she said, for lack of a better word. “Spill. What’s wrong?”

He sighed. “It was Danny’s birthday on Saturday.”

“Oh, Tim. I’m so sorry.” Sasha laid a hand on his shoulder. She was. She was always sorry. Sorry for Tim’s loss, sorry that she still didn’t know what to do about it, sorry she and Tim just couldn’t figure out what they were in time. 

Tim shrugged jerkily, dislodging her hand. “S’alright. I also, uh, I had an encounter with Martin’s significant other on Friday.”

Sasha’s eyebrows shot towards her hairline. “You--”

Tim glanced pointedly at the taxi driver. “Yeah, he was pretty charming. Bought Martin roses. Saved me from an unpleasant encounter with my brother.”

Sasha’s hand went to her mouth. 

“I’ll explain later,” Tim said, turning his head to look out the window. “Promise.”

Tim had promised Sasha a lot of things. To change, to get better, to try. 

She hoped for both their sakes this promise was different.

The apartment building was modest but well-kept. Sasha rang the doorbell and wished once more that Tim had let her bring her taser.

Sasha’s first impression of Georgie Barker was that of a barely contained whirlwind. The woman Jonathan had tagged in all of his posts wore a green shirt with _What the Ghost_ written on it in white. The shirt clashed horribly with the orange cat in her arms. 

“You from the Magnus Institute?” she asked.

Sasha nodded. 

“You may as well come inside,” Georgie sighed. “Jon said you’re persistent.”

Tim and Sasha exchanged glances. With a feeling of foreboding, Sasha stepped into Georgie’s apartment. 

“What do you want to know?” Georgie asked once Sasha and Tim were settled on the lumpy but quite comfortable couch. “Jon didn’t say.”

Sasha knew exactly what she wanted to know. “What was he like, before?”

“Oh, we’re getting right to it, are we?” Georgie laughed a little and stroked a hand down her large orange cat’s back. “All right, I can respect that. Let’s see. Jon… Jon was a mess.”

Sasha choked on air.

“I mean that in the best way,” Georgie elaborated, a little sheepishly. “It’s just that he… well.”

The story that followed was remarkable in many ways. Sasha watched Georgie’s face as she talked about band rehearsals and cigarette smoke and realized that she already knew what it was like to love someone like Jonathan Sims. 

Georgie and Jonathan had been one of those could’ve, _should've_ been more couples. One of those couples where one of them was just a little too much of a mess, where the other was just a little too unwilling to bend, where they missed each other in translation by just a little too much.

Just like Sasha and Tim had been. 

“He popped up again a few months ago,” Georgie concluded. “Anything else?”

“Er, no,” Sasha said. “Except-- can we have your number?”

Georgie scribbled it down on a scrap of paper.

“Thank you so much, Ms. Barker,” Sasha said.

“Georgie. Please.”

“Georgie,” Sasha corrected. They smiled at each other.

“Oh, actually, I do have one more question,” Tim said abruptly. “How does he use Instagram with those hands?”

“Very carefully,” Georgie said.

“Don’t even think about being friends with her,” Tim warned. “She’s too scary.”

“I wonder if she has a taser,” Sasha mused. Tim groaned. 

When Sasha returned to her office, there was a thick sheaf of papers on her desk. The first stapled set read, _Statement of Archival Assistant Jonathan Sims, regarding_ _A Guest for Mr. Spider._

She flipped to the next one. 

_Statement of Archival Assistant Jonathan Sims, regarding the messiah of the Lightless Flame._

Sasha sat down slowly. 

Her conversation with Tim could wait for a while. 


	14. Chapter Thirteen: Martin

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact: working in retail for 40 hours a week during a pandemic is not conducive to creativity.  
> Thank you all so much for your patience. I'm hoping I can get back to a decent-sized chapter every week, but unfortunately I can't make any promises.  
> This chapter is pretty short and not a whole lot happens, but I wanted to try to get going again, so here we are.  
> Dedicated-- very belatedly-- as a happy birthday present to the wonderful yumantimatter.  
> Thanks for reading, hope you like it, and I love hearing from y'all!

When Elias called him to his office, Martin wasn’t sure what to expect, but he knew it couldn’t be good.

“Please, sit,” Elias said, gesturing to his incredibly uncomfortable guest chair. “This shouldn’t take long.”

Martin sat with anxiety bubbling in his stomach.

“It has come to my attention that you are… fraternising with the enemy.”

Martin did his best to channel Sasha at her most impassive. “Excuse me?”

“Let’s not play games, Martin.” Elias leaned forward. It was a slight movement, but it was enough to make Martin jolt backwards. Elias smiled thinly. “I know that you are… involved… with a former archival assistant. Jonathan, isn’t it? A bitter, unstable man, wouldn’t you say?”

“I would not say that,” Martin said, his outrage on Jon’s behalf overriding his self-preservation. He cursed himself when Elias smiled once more. 

“Just be careful,” the Head of the Institute said. “He killed a man when he was a child, you know. I wouldn’t trust anything he gives you.”

“... And then he said you killed someone,” Martin finished, trying-- and failing-- to read Jon’s expression.

“Well.” Jon’s fingers, which were gently wrapped around Martin’s hands and arms, twitched but didn’t draw blood. “That, at least, is somewhat true. I didn’t kill him, but I was the cause of his death.”

“Will you tell me?”

“No.” Jon paused. “Not right now, anyway.”

Martin nodded, accepting that answer. It was a miracle Jon was here at all, talking to him, holding his hand. It was a miracle there were daisies on his table, arranged in a vase that no longer hurt his eyes. He wasn’t going to ruin that by pushing for details on Jon’s past. Jon didn’t ask about Martin’s mother; Martin wouldn’t ask about accusations of murder. 

He laughed a little, realising how odd a sentence that was. Jon gave him a curious look and didn’t ask. 

When Sasha came into work with a horribly burned hand, Martin hovered anxiously, unsure of what to do. Thankfully, Tim took over. 

“What happened?” Tim asked, shoving Sasha (gently) into a chair and rummaging for the first aid kit. “What did you do?”

“ _ I  _ didn’t do anything,” Sasha said crossly. “We can blame Martin’s boyfriend for this one.”

Martin nearly choked. It was the first time anyone, including he and John, had ever spoken of his relationship out loud. “Jon did this?”

“So it’s Jon now, is it?” Sasha asked before visibly relenting. “No. But his report sent me to the person who did.”

“Which means it’s not Jon’s fault.”

“Whatever,” Tim said. “Just-- Sash, just sit still, all right? Burns get infected easily, and the NHS already has its eye on us.”

Sasha rolled her eyes but allowed Tim to begin wrapping her hand with fresh bandages. “I found this stack of reports on my desk.  _ Statement of Archival Assistant Jonathan Sims, regarding the messiah of the Lightless Flame _ \--” her voice took on an unearthly echo for a moment before she continued-- “and so on and so forth. I went looking.”

“‘The messiah of the Lightless Flame?’” Tim repeated. 

“Yes. Agnes Montague, apparently. I went looking for her and found Jude Perry, the lovely lady who did this.” Sasha waved her hand and nearly smacked Tim in the face.

Tim glared half-heartedly. “How did you find this Jude lady?”

Sasha paused. “I… I don’t know.”

Martin shifted in the silence which followed. 

“Whatever.” Tim finished with the bandages. “So Martin’s boyfriend is now trying to kill you? He mention that on date night, Martin?”

“I don’t know if it was Jonathan, actually,” Sasha said. “He said he doesn’t care if we live or die.”

Tim threw up his hands. “Oh, very reassuring! The embodiment of insanity doesn’t care if we live or die!”

Martin muttered, “He cares.”

Nobody heard him. 

“So who put those papers there?” Tim asked.

Sasha said, “I’m not sure, but I think maybe Elias.”

Martin nodded. “I’m pretty sure it was Elias.”

Tim rubbed his hands over his face and said, “Fantastic. You think he sent my brother after me, too?”

“What?” Sasha and Martin asked in perfect unison.


	15. Chapter Fourteen: Sasha

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’ve been up since 4:30, had way too much caffeine, and dealt with a whole bunch of idiots without masks. Let’s do this.  
> (Wear a goddamn mask, kids. Believe what the scientists say. This has been a PSA.)  
> I will have Wednesdays off for the immediate future, so updates will be on Wednesdays after today for the time being.  
> Also, plot note-- I know the Vast and the Hunt have yet to make an appearance.  
> There’s a reason for that.  
> *evil cackle*

Sasha was too busy thinking of Tim’s strange and disturbing encounter with his dead brother to notice the mannequin in her apartment in time.

“Archivist!” Nikola Orsinov exclaimed, skipping forward. “So good to see you. Or, well, not see, you see…” she giggled, gesturing at her eyes. Sasha swallowed bile- and a scream-- as Nikola’s left eye, which dangled from a small child's slinky, twitched with the movement. The mannequin’s other eye appeared to be a large button.

“ **What do you want?** ” Sasha demanded. 

Nikola opened her mouth, then closed it again, hard. Blood came spraying out of her mouth. 

Sasha couldn’t help it. She was not a brave woman. 

She screamed, as loudly as she could. She would have kept screaming if Breekon and/or Hope hadn’t placed a rag which smelled slightly too sweet over her face.

Chloroform took longer than most people would think to knock you out.

Sasha was not most people. She knew down to the second how much time she had, and she struggled for all she was worth. 

It wasn’t enough. 

Her last thought was  _ Tim.  _

Sasha didn’t know how long she was in the dark. 

Far too long. 

Far, far too long. 

Sasha was in the dark, and then she wasn’t anymore. Or, rather, she was, but it was a different kind of dark. A more familiar dark, with more familiar eyes. 

She tried to say  _ Jonathan _ , but managed only an inarticulate croaking noise through her gag.

“Shh.” Jonathan placed one long, curling finger to his lips. Sasha thought he did, anyway. It was too dark to tell. “Be quiet before I decide to leave you here.”

Sasha stopped trying to talk. 

The embodiment of insanity sliced through her bonds with sickening ease. Sasha assumed he was using his fingers. 

They slipped through the now-familiar yellow door in silence. Sasha barely hesitated before following Jonathan in. 

The entity had-- to her great unease and trepidation-- earned a small and grudging amount of Sasha’s trust. Between repeatedly saving her life and his relationship with Martin, she was more certain he had good intentions than not.  
Besides. She’d take being impaled by those fingers over being moisturized and skinned.

“I read your statements,” Sasha blurted an indeterminate amount of time later. She blamed the however-long of solitude for her loosened tongue. Jonathan paused before his head, and only his head, turned around so he could face her. 

“Oh?”

“We think Elias left them on my desk.”

Jonathan snorted, turning around again. “And that didn’t strike you as suspicious?”

“Well, clearly.”

“Allow me to rephrase, as your brain has clearly suffered from your time in the hold of the I Do Not Know You. The master of manipulation-- or so he considers himself, despite the existence of the Mother of Puppets-- being so blatant didn’t strike you as suspicious?”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Sasha admitted. She was too busy intrigued by everything he’d said to be affronted by his insults, as was usually the case with Jonathan. 

“If you had a nickel for every time you’ve said that, you might be able to buy some common sense.”

They had arrived at the door, as well as the end of the conversation. Sasha could tell from the tapping of Jonathan’s fingers that he would give away no more information.

“Where are you letting me out?” Sasha asked before she opened the door.

“You’ll see.”

Sasha blinked and she was no longer in Jonathan’s endless hallways.

Instead, she was standing over Jurgen Leitner’s dead body.

He had been impaled. If she had to guess, Sasha would have said that he had been killed by something long and sharp. 

Or perhaps five such things.

Sasha remembered the ease with which Jonathan had sliced through her bonds and vomited. 

She was wiping her mouth when the police walked in. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I keep forgetting to let y'all know-- I run a TMA tumblr under the username didnt-actually-die-here. Feel free to come look at TMA memes, say hi, yell at me about cliffhangers, etc.  
> Stay safe and have a good week!


	16. Chapter Fifteen: Sasha//Tim//Martin

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The sheer amount of comments I got that were just “Jurgen Leitner’s murder fills me with joy” was perhaps to be expected. It was still really funny.  
> Thank you so much for all your feedback, y’all. It truly makes my day every time I see a new comment in my inbox.  
> Plot note: Tim and Martin didn’t see Jurgen Leitner’s body.

Detective Daisy Tonner was unimpressed with Sasha’s story. 

“You came in to do some work and there was just... a dead man on the floor?”

“Yes. How many times do I have to--”

“And you have no idea who killed him.” It’s not a question.

“No,” Sasha gritted out. 

“Just like you have no idea how you managed to evade the security tapes on your way in.”

“ _ No _ .”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m. Telling. The. Truth.”

(She wasn’t.)

Tonner just snapped her notebook shut. “We’ll be in touch. Don’t leave London.”

Sasha bit back several choice comments and nodded obediently. 

She strode out of the police station with her bubbling fury barely contained. Something about Tonner would have rubbed her the wrong way even if the police officer hadn’t been interrogating her under suspicion of murder. 

Tim was waiting outside her apartment. At the sight of him Sasha felt the day’s events slam into her all at once. 

Tears began to streak down her cheeks.

“Jesus,” Tim said, and he folded her into his arms without a moment’s pause. “Jesus, Sasha. I was-- I thought-- I don’t know what I thought. But…”

“Yeah.” Sasha buried her face in his shoulder. It was bony beneath the layers of muscle, a comforting discomfort that grounded her like little else could have. “Yeah.”

“I didn’t think I’d see you again,” Tim said. “I thought you were gone.”

“I’m never going to be gone,” Sasha murmured into his shoulder. “Not unless you want me to be.” 

Then Tim was crying too.

They fell into bed much like they had that first time-- fumbling and eager and desperate to outrun things.

Sasha fell asleep with her face on Tim’s chest. Every time she jerked awake in a panic, Jurgen Leitner’s butchered corpse and Jonathan’s curling fingers flashing in her mind’s eye, his steady breathing lulled her back to sleep.

She woke up alone. On her kitchen table was a creased note in Tim’s slanting handwriting.

_ Don’t follow me.  _

__ Sasha ran for the door. Taped to it was another note from Tim.

_ It was me or you. Don’t fucking follow me. _

__ She swore at Tim and went to get her pepper spray. 

//

(The note had been left on Tim’s desk. Tim had noticed it as he sat numbly at his desk, staring at the cup of tea Martin had made. 

The note read  _ Go to 330 Lighthouse Lane if you want Sasha James to live. _ )

The house wasn’t hard to find, although he probably would have been impossible to track down if not for the address Elias had left Tim.

At least Tim assumed it had been Elias. He even hoped it was. The other option-- Jonathan-- was even more unpalatable.

As he walked towards the isolated house on the coast, Tim tried to discern Elias’ motives.

His manipulations were obvious, but Tim supposed they didn’t need to be subtle to work. Sasha had been quite happy to follow his plans so far. They all had, really. Martin less so than Tim and Sasha, perhaps-- Martin seemed to have chosen Jonathan’s manipulations over Elias’-- but the three of them followed the path laid out by the Head of the Institute all the same. 

But why was Elias being so clumsy? It almost made Tim doubt that he was being manipulated.

Regardless, he was going to 330 Lighthouse Lane. And, if he was honest, it wasn’t just because of the threat against Sasha. 

“Too damn curious for my own good,” Tim muttered, and he strode towards the looming house on the horizon. 

//

“Jon?” Martin asked, looking over at the man-- entity?-- beside him. The embodiment of insanity was propped against Martin’s headboard, reading a book.

“Mmm?” Jon looked up from  _ Catch-22 _ .

“Why are you working with Elias?”

Jon returned to his book. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I saw the note on Tim’s desk. It was in your handwriting.” Martin didn’t know how Jon could write, but his spiky handwriting was distinctive.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Jon closed his book. “No you’re not.”

Martin’s vision began to swim.

“Don’t you dare,” Martin hissed, ignoring the dizziness. “You promised not to do that.”

“I did.” Martin blinked away the stars as Jon stood. “My apologies.”

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“I presumed you would not want a traitor warming your bed.”

“Hey. You promised not to do that, either.”

“Do what?”

“Undermine what we are.”

Jon sighed. “Very well. What would you have of me?”

“I,” Martin said firmly, “would have the truth.”

“A dangerous proposition.”

“I don’t care.”

Jon smiled, revealing teeth in rows like a shark’s. “Liar.”

Martin shrugged. “Takes one to know one.”

Jon’s laughter echoed around Martin’s bedroom. 

Despite himself, despite  _ everything _ , the sound made Martin smile.

“Very well,” Jon said. “I’ll start at the end. I killed Jurgen Leitner.”

“ _ What _ ?”

“In my defense, he was very annoying.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come hang out with me on Tumblr at notyouranswers or didnt-actually-die-here! I’m taking prompts!


	17. Update on Updates

Hey y'all,

Just wanted to let you know that the next chapter will probably be a few more weeks. I'm moving across the country and also need to figure out how plot works.

I love this story. I want to do it justice.

Thanks for understanding.

-Jay


	18. Tim

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A dead woman opened the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, uh. *clears throat* It's been a wild several months for me, y'all. I won't go into detail, just... thanks for your patience.   
> I know this chapter is quite short-- let me know if you prefer longer chapters less regularly or shorter chapters on a more regular basis. I found the thread of the plot again, so I should be able to update more often.   
> This fic now has fanart by the phenomenal foiblepnoteworthy! Stare at it in admiration here: https://foiblepnoteworthy.tumblr.com/post/641478545968906241/id-a-spiral-version-of-jon-sits-on-a-windowsill  
> I have a Twitter (@mystoryends5) where I'll post updates about progress on fics; I have a TMA Tumblr (@didnt-actually-die-here) where I post memes and take requests! Come say hi!  
> Lastly, I just wanted to let you know how much I appreciated all of your comments. They made me smile at a time in my life when I needed that.

Tim knocked on the door of 330 Lighthouse Lane. A dead woman opened the door. 

He gaped. 

“Close your mouth, Timothy, you’ll catch flies,” Gertrude Robinson said. “And get in here before someone sees you.”

Tim obeyed on numb legs. “By someone, I presume you mean Elias?”

“Mm.” Gertrude led him into a kitchen painted in a shade of grey-blue that reminded Tim of a pale corpse’s skin. “We should be safe from prying eyes here. Until Peter Lukas gets bored with me, at any rate.”

Tim held up a hand. “Wait. How-- who--  _ what _ ?”

Gertrude sighed. There were more lines etched around her mouth, now, and her glasses were thicker, but it was still her. Or at least Tim sincerely hoped it was. “Jonathan and I promised to help him carry out a ritual to end the world for the Lonely if he kept me hidden.”

“Great. Moving on from whatever the hell that means, how the  _ fuck _ are you alive?”

“Don’t curse unless you’re actively bleeding out,” Gertrude said. “And I’m alive because Jonathan wants me to suffer. Surely you can understand that.”

Tim had to sit down. The chair was unpleasantly damp. “What?”

She sighed again. “He rescued me from Elias because he realized that letting me live as a failure was more painful than killing me. I didn’t let him die, so he didn’t let me die. We have an arrangement.”

“Fucked up arrangement.”

“Language, Timothy.”

Tim bit his tongue.  _ More pressing concerns, Tim.  _ “Are you the one who’s been leaving the statements on Sasha’s desk?”

“No, that was Jonathan. I am rather confined to this house. The Beholding can’t find me here.”

“Yeah, speaking of that, who’s Peter Lukas, and why are you helping him end the world?”

“I never said the world would actually end,” Gertrude pointed out. 

Tim rolled his eyes. He would have been appalled at his manners, once, but that was him a dead brother ago. “Answer the question.”

“Why should I?”

Tim stared at her. “Am I here for any reason besides to be annoyed?”

“Yes. You’re here to be bait.”

Tim blinked once, then bolted to his feet. “Sasha.”

“Not exactly.”

“Then--” Tim cut himself off. “That cop. The one who didn’t believe her.”

Gertrude inclined her head. “Do sit back down, Timothy. It shouldn’t be long now.”

Tim ignored her and strode towards the door. He ripped it open and nearly stepped through before he saw the swirling colors of Jonathan’s hallways. 

“Oh.” 

“Indeed.”

Tim sat back down. 

“Tea?” Gertrude offered. 

Tim did his best to channel Sasha’s most intimidating glare. Gertrude remained unphased.

Five minutes of silence later, Sasha’s scream ripped through the air. 

This time, the door opened onto the white shell pathway Tim had walked up. 


End file.
